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CQFUUGHT DEPOSIT.

THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TREES

The Garden of Seven Trees

By Bennett Weaver

With a Foreword by William Johnston

The Cornhill Publishing Company Boston

Copyright, 1921 THE CORNHILL PUBLISHING COMPANY

OCIA654228

DEC 29 1921

/^\i> j

f-

TO MY WIFE

FOREWORD

To mention only four of the short poems in the present volume, one who can achieve pieces as unhke and as successful as Remembering ("Is it the scent of the cedar bower?"), The Candle^ Gypsy Glen and Boughs of May deserves the name of poet. The first named has rare delicacy of thought, and it combines with this a felicity of meter and a loveliness of half-concealed rhymes which are in perfect harmony with it. The Candle is vivid in its picture-forming power. It is the kind of conception in which emotion is made frozen and static through its own intensity. Gypsy Glen is a poem of deep and true emotion. It is undoubtedly the voice of the heart, though the other two poems may be the product of the poetic and dramatic imagination. As to Boughs of May, there is to me something alluring in its irregular but smooth movement and in its psychol- ogy of the mind, unhinged by grief, which speaks of "black-eyed song," which thinks of the stars as "blood-buds," and which tries to forget the tomb beneath the moon in a despairing belief that the loved one is not dead:

"Oh, it's joy to be a-going And I've worn the pathway true, Joy» joy to be a-going Back to you

An apple bough hung straight against the moon!"

vii

Foreword

Having named these four pieces as introduc- tory examples of Mr. Weaver's poetic gift, I wish to mention the qualities from which the reader will, I believe, derive the chief pleasure that will be given him by this volume. First in order, though not in importance, I would place Mr. Weaver's intense and individual love of the beau- tiful.

"a heart whose flame Was busy round the beauty of the world,"

from his poem Age, would well characterize the poet himself.

To some degree we judge the poet by his suc- cess in catching those elements of beauty which are common to all true poets; in some degree we judge him by the distinctive and original man- ner in which he detects, in the world and in the imagination, elements of beauty which other poets have not so clearly seen or reproduced. I find in the work of Mr. Weaver an attractive and original note of imaginative loveliness. I find this in the sea of gold and the sand of silver of the lyric. Lost, in its white sail cutting a white moon, and in the flashing suggestiveness of

"One soul to the moon on the waters, And one, home."

I find it, likewise, in the wistful sweetness of The Dim Water and The Moon Was White; it flashes upon me from poem after poem. Some- times it reveals itself in a vision of an idealized or romanticized world, for the flame of this poet's heart is often busy round a world which

viii

Foreword

is not of this earth, and I am certain that there are many who can admire the most reaUstic of the Chicago poems of Carl Sandburg, for instance, and can as much admire those of Mr. Weaver's poems which have the background of a roman- ticized world. I think that Sandburg himself will recognize the high poetic qualities of the latter. He will recognize the validity, for some writers at least, of Mr. Weaver's theory of the two worlds, for from childhood our poet has lived busily and laboriously in the real world and eagerly and intensely in the dream world. He trusts life, but at times he must enter into his closet and shut the door. Then he hears the voices that make no sound. Then he plucks lilies from the sky and flame from the water. If is from this world that he finds much of his finest and most typical poetry, and I think that it is this world which is the object of his best love.

A second characteristic of Mr. Weaver's verse, and that in which I consider it most noteworthy and most deserving of praise, is its high imagina- tive quality. Sometimes, as in Under a Rose, his imagination takes the lighter form of fancy, playing with its fancy rather than gripped by it

"Living and dying, My heart and the rose."

but usually it is imagination in its higher form. Mr. Weaver is successful in the imaginative reali- zation of emotion, and I know of no living poet who surpasses him in that imaginative realiza- tion of likeness which springs from emotion and expresses itself in figures of speech :

Foreword

"now shadows form, and, dimly great, Huge-shouldered things press at the hills."

"The water of the storm is bitter upon the pane; Night goes against the stars like black acid,

or, more simply,

"The mouldering garth-fence, level to the feet of the intruder wind."

"the shadows lie Hard on the heart I love the best."

or, of a dead child,

"he left his play And made no track on his white way to sleep."

Such visualization of emotion as is found in figures like these, which are taken almost at random, is of the very essence of poetry. For a longer passage I quote from Mar sea:

"You sat On a high place, a windy sun Coronal round you. Over the white Of your shoulder a bronze-dim harp Curved its wild throat. Your hand wrought Gleaming upon the gleaming strings, Unweaving long tresses of music Which darted and flashed down the wind."

It will be worth the reader's while to analyze the complex pictorial suggestiveness and the sweep- ing ligurativeness of the passage.

Foreword

The third element of the work of Mr. Weaver to which I would refer is his originality. I say this in spite of my belief that some readers will criticiTie his poetry on the ground that it seems at times to echo that of other writers. In two pieces one can doubtless detect "faint Tenny- sonian echoes, nothing worth," and certainly no one will fail to catch some re\'erl:)erations that are of Belgian origin. There are a few lines reminiscent of Keats, of Poe, of Milton. Un- questionably Marsea has affinities with certain other plays, affinities in characters, in setting, in atmosphere, and in mood. Even more perhaps may be said of The Seekers, jet I do not hesitate to say that the author of the present volume may fairly be considered a decidedly original poet. He is unlike some of our contemporary poets in that the essence of his originality is too subtle to be caught in the net of a definition, yet it is vital. It is as elusive as personality itself, yet as dis- tinct. It is pervasive rather than concentrated, and it reflects a definitely individual attitude toward life. This attitude has nothing of the journalistic, and it is not mere novelty. It is es- sentially poetic, and it gives a distinctive and a very attractive quality to the majority of the poems in the volume. It is revealed more by suggestion and by haunting melody than by direct statement. It is involved not only in word and phrase or in picture and image, but in that harmony of the whole which makes a true poem much more than equal to the sum of its parts. Yet I by no means intend to intimate that it is never shown in newness of subject

XI

Foreword

matter. And of one thing I am certain : this poet is a sincere and conscientious artist; he will do the thing in the way which he thinks right rather than in the way which others may think new. The originality is not part of a make-up, but part of the man. Consequently, it will more and more reveal itself outwardly and it will not be subject to sudden change.

Though the three qualities which I have named seem to me to be those in which Mr. Weaver shows most distinction, they are supported by many others. The reader will find evidence of a mind logical as well as imaginative, and will dis- cover that this poet's tendency to idealize does not by any means exclude accuracy of observation. He will find some interesting psychology in the poems, one example being Marsea. This is a poetical drama which should succeed upon the stage of some of the best of our little theaters. The two characters of the drama proper are equal in loveliness but unequal in strength, and the play is a poetic embodiment of the idea that when two personalities meet, each attempts, consciously or unconsciously, to absorb, to ap- propriate, to consume the other. The rapture of such absorption, the beauty of it, the recog- nition by the weaker of the fearful danger of it, are the motive of the poem

"Beauty Is blood . . .

... It was you who taught Me truth and you who taught of beauty. And you consumed me!"

xii

Foreword

Of Mr. Weaver's success as a narrative poet the present volume affords the reader but one example by which to form an opinion. Alladine is from several points of view an interesting poem, one in which many readers will find much to enjoy. I heard the author read it in a certain gusty lane one autumn afternoon, and found it delightful. The owl that sat all night at Alia- dine's casement

"Snipping the bones of a lesser bird"

seemed very owlish, midnightish and malignant; and the song of the while winds gave a subtly lyrical effect. The idea of a girl whose pride in her voice led to the plan for robbing all the nightingales of the tips of their tongues im- pressed me as a good point of departure for build- ing up the simple but sufficient plot of the poem. Naturally, the Earl's daughter must suffer for her selfishness:

"Then Alladine lifts up her eye. All in the forest at midnight hour, And the mists like loung-sloughed viper skins Are coiled round the dead men dancing there.

'And ye must sing,' the whisper wails, 'Sing to the forest made dumb for thee.' "

When she sings, then

"Down sink the tarn-men in the mere; The coiled mists thin and fail to go;

xiii

Foreword

And the great owl buffets the night with wings That are full of flight and windy fear; And the moon sweeps up, and the nightingales Burst from the bough in chorus full."

Of The Garden of Seven Trees as representative of Mr. Weaver's thought about human life and destiny much could be said. Likewise, could much be said of the plan and the setting of this philosophic drama and of its value as showing what power the author possesses as a creative artist. I think that it may find fewer admirers than many of the other poems, but that the ad- miration of some readers will be sincere and deep. The poem has served to deepen in me the general impression which a reading of all of the poems of the volume has made. That impression is this: Mr. Weaver is a true poet. He comes offering a genuine gift of imaginative beauty. Though his poetry may not make an impression of extreme novelty, it is original and distinctive. His work will be a source of keen enjoyment to all who are alive to the most characteristic sources of poetic pleasure, and from some of the poems the kind of pleasure derived will be found intimately con- nected with the deepest part of our complex inner life.

WILLIAM JOHNSTON.

Lake McDonald, Montana. September 10, 1920.

XIV

CONTENTS I.

Lost 5

To 5

Victima 6

The Death Task 7

Sixes and Sevens 8

Silence 12

II.

To C. W. W 15

Two Sonnet Songs 15

Aspen Shadow 17

A Sonnet 17

Oh, Lovely One 18

On the Pier 19

A Rondeau 21

Out of Sleep 21

Sonnet 23

A Graveyard 23

Gipsy Glen 25

Eighty Days 30

Sonnet ("Come now your night-shade") ... 32

Lo, Anywhere 32

Two Poems on the Separation 33

A Marsh Song 34

Thou Lovely Star 35

Under a Rose 37

Ave Verum 38

Boughs of May 39

XV

Confenis

III.

Mortling 43

Fever 44

The Ghost 46

November Wind 47

Earth 48

Three Men 48

Age and Youth 50

Lines on Beauty 52

Conjecture 53

Ah, Sappho 55

Snow Musk 55

The Snows 56

By an Evolutionist 57

The Moon Was White 58

The Dim Water 58

Himerius to Sappho 59

A Song 60

Blue Birds 61

A Sonnet in blank verse to 61

Rocks 62

Lintels of the Sun 66

Sonnet To— 67

The Candle 68

Two Triolets 69

Remembering 70

Dead 72

To— 73

Marsea 77

Alladine 95

The Seekers 123

The Garden 9f Seven Trees 151

Sonnet 183

XVI

THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TREES

The Garden of Seven Trees

LOST

The creep of the gold sea Up the silver of the sand,

A white sail cutting the white moon, A cry from land.

The long path over the moor, A pale path away from the foam.

One soul to the moon on the waters, And one, home.

TO

I could not think, so loud he sang. That Silence ever could come here, Silence and dreadful eating Fear,

Grief with her low remorseful pang.

I could not think, so tenderly He stooped to whisper unto me. Of night grown lonely after day. Of day more black than night alway. 5

The Garden of Seven Trees

I could not think this Hfe were sweet And worth the living to the end.

Did I not think our ways should meet, And he once more would call me friend.

11

The brook crawled blackening to the light, A black cloud crawled across the star. The moon hung like a saffron scar

Upon the mad face of the night.

The wind yelled out and beat the tree Down, down to sob of him to me; Frost-poisoned grass blades slashed my face Bent low in one wild prayer for grace.

For grace to love him still the same Who laughs against another's cheek,

Nor knows no more my house nor name, Nor the lone ways that I must seek.

VICTIMA

There is no harder thing than this: To speak of death to one you love;

To hold the hand you soon will miss While all your years more slowly move;

The Garden of Seven Trees

To say good-bye at evening time And face the empty night alone,

While stars you've named togetlier climb Along the slow wind's path of moan;

To lie upon your couch while sleep Dazzles your sense before its fall;

To hear a calling from the deep, And from the night to hear a call.

The sunset boat moves out to sea. The wind fills well and blows away;

But this broad shore is strange to me,

And strange the night and strange the day.

THE DEATH TASK

I said, "This sweet deceiving thing That we call life, were better done.

All beauty rests her glorious wing In dust. Beneath the going sun.

Frail, fair things die and good things cease, Love's tender tumult slowly fails,

And on the shore, apart from peace. We ever watch the outgoing sails."

7

The Garden of Seven Trees

But now, to-night, beside the form That was so beautiful and dear,

A soft voice whispers thru the storm, And pain is cooled and thought and fear.

The darkness gently falls apart Across a light and pleasant way;

I know Life's hand upon my heart, And Death kneels kindly near to pray.

SIXES AND SEVENS

SIX

Ten thousand links of gold and iron and lead Were quarried from the heart of God by past Eternities to chain my soul. And men. Ten thousand thousand, by the forges, dead. Grey bone by ashen steel, have wrought and cast My destiny. I am what they were then.

My habits are their tendencies. I live Their dreams. From seed a million aeons sown I reap a harvest that is not my own. The graneries of Thebes and Ipsambool Were empty still when all my life was full. And life for me has nothing more to give. 8

The Garden of Seven Trees

I am the host of ages, and my heart The food of mummied mouths. My being, aye, My self, my soul, is but the perfumed breath Of those who live in me beyond their death. Oh, what is man? And what, indeed, am I? A hope, a fever, come but to depart!

In Adam all men lived. We all have died Before our birth. Life came to us as dreams In death, called, and the echo but replied. We are but drops in myriad branched streams That swelled to movement from God's lonely tear; And ours is but to go, to move, to fear.

Our death is common and our brotherhood Is deep as life. Your good is still my good. I share your food, your dress, your shelter, and Your being. You have nothing private tho You dig to hide the thing. The grave's in land We own together. Life is one. You go,

I come, but age and life remain. 'Tis true, Were all men put in one there yet would be But one, and he with no more power to see, To feel, to live than each has now. Go, do Thy mightiest deed, contend in bravest strife. You can not mark eternity or life ! 9

The Garden of Seven Trees

Man's pride and glory still must be to wear His chains like ornaments; to keep, not share His task; to live with courage; to endure, Self-mastered, self-sufficient, self-secure. He who is king of self is thrice crowned king Of all that the eternities can bring.

SEVEN

I come now to this granite jaw of rock, Which, beast-like, champs the waves in frothy rage. Sunk is the sun in sudden dark. No glow Of light remains. Above the shore-long shock Of plunging tides, the heavy winds presage Tumult and doom and night. The sea curves slow

Its back into the sky and lunges full And furious at the shore. Its white tusks pull Bases from tottering cliffs and grind and roar Like thunder chained to some Caucasian hill. This is the end, the end, and nevermore Shall I lie down and rest and tajke my fill.

Sunk are the singing streams. The birds have flown Thru olden sunsets and the flowers are dead. The happy heart, the cool, bare flesh upon The grass, the dreams, the songs, and all I own As good, they, too, have fainted, feared, and fled. Fled like fall birds are joys before the dawn 10

The Garden of Seven Trees

Of the eternal winter in my soul.

Is this the age and wisdom for which I

Have spent my youth and spirit? This the end

Of that flowered path whereon I still did bend

My longing footstep onward? Why, oh, why?

Is not the pathway better than the goal?

Night sweeps her finger o'er the page of life And blots the whole. The guttered candle flame She puffs upon infinite darkness snaps Across eternity! Youth sucks and laps At knowledge, age retains, death drops a name Upon a stone, and nothing of the strife !

What purpose is in life? Love man, love God? Increase and multiply? God needs not love, Man needs not life. Why should an animate clod Beneath the disc, the harrow, look above Toward the sun, because some wind-blown seed Has fallen where life's heart began to bleed?

All paths must end and some end by the sea, And this my path is ended now for me. I walked the way, I asked of none to ride, And now I feel the swelling of the tide. On this raw rock I gladly lay me down, My head unbraced, unfettered by a crown. 11

The Garden of Seven Trees

SILENCE

There was a silence.

As if sleep were stroking a mouldy bell,

As if death were closing his wing in mist,

A great silence.

And it covered all the world.

I could hear the dew

Slipping from the grass blades,

Nestling in the cobwebs of the world.

And in all strange places

There were strange silences:

Silence as of a lark sleeping,

As of lambs thrusting their noses into wool,

As of men making anthems on a peak,

As of God moving His great eyes.

My soul was full of trembling, Like the beam of a little star. Smitten with tempest.

12

11

The Garden of Seven Trees

TO C. C. W.

If I might sing no more,

Nor nevermore

In morning song voice my full soul,

If but one song I had

Of all songs yet to sing,

I'd spend it with a full heart

Praising you,

Companion of my gentle, nearer hours,

My quiet close to God.

TWO SONNET SONGS I

The young leaf comes unto the willow tree. The young lark in the meadow beats her wing ;

Low on the circling hills of mystery

There pants the bosom of the maiden Spring.

Fair form, in crocus and aenemone

Woven with golden sun, the dewy hour

Of Morning draws from you her jubilee,

And Evening passions with your master power. 15

The Garden of Seven Trees

Not so with me that feed on human breath, And know the Autumn that must freeze along

The human beauty of our bhnded hfe. You grieve me deepher than the Winter wrong

Which makes a nothing out of all our strife.

And fastens all our little ways in Death.

II

You do me wrong, you little birds, to play. You do me wrong, you little birds, to sing:

"Your true love sleeps a far and far away;

What message shall we from your true love bring?"

Ah, what would such as you with burdening love To weight your little breasts and break your wing? For you would fall and perish there above The thorn wastes, you would perish with the thing !

Or if you still would serve me, swiftly fly And build your happiness about her there,

And twitter nothing how my heart would die Of lonely grief and agonized despair:

Build round her fortress joys in carol sweet.

And lay my sad soul dumbly at her feet. 16

The Garden of Seven Trees

ASPEN SHADOW

Roses in the shadow,

In the aspen shadow, roses.

Spirit-still the night that closes

Round us, sweet-heart,

Here within the aspen shadow

And among the roses.

Music, music, memory,

In the shadow come to me;

Rose of life, you come to me,

You, my sweet-heart.

Here within the aspen shadow,

Here among the roses.

A SONNET

Even if those quiet eyes turn not the way My fancy, haunted by the joy of years, Shall wander; even if those tender ears. Too pleasured with the common things I say, Heed not the unwavering music of my lay Clear sung, of faith the silver note, of love The golden chord; yet shall my soul above All sorrow, be content to hope and pray. 17

The Garden of Seven Trees

For song has yet companionship divine

Within itself, and he who in his heart

Has music, has all earth and heaven beside.

Ah, who shall thumb and touch the secret, fine

Estrangement of that dumbly aching part

Of elsewise perfect love, which, longing, died?

OH, LOVELY ONE

Oh, lovely one among the flowers,

I can not sing !

The melancholy hours

Are on my heart;

I perish in the sight of you, most fair.

It is the woe of all the world, beloved,

It is the woe of all the world

That covers me,

And even you, beloved, can not save my soul.

The moon in her high place is bright. Is bright among her stars ; The night

Is all about me, lovely and serene. And yet again the dumbness of my heart ! Even that you are near, so utter dumb With wonder

And the grief, the grief that will not spare my soul.

18

The Garden of Seven Trees

I have heard youth in pain,

And old age groan :

I shall not hear again

Your voice, my love,

But I shall think of all the woeful world.

The woe of all the world from youth to age.

You are so beautiful that I must die.

Oh, lovely one.

The melancholy hours are on my heart!

ON THE PIER

That evening I huddled in the mist That clung upon the bosom of the sea; I felt you come, I knew that we had kist; But all about the living mystery Folded me from the shore, and I alone. Oh, love, from those old deeps what was the groan That sounded till the waters shook apart. Revealed the hidden? Love, love, upon my heart Make me my answer and so let me sleep! You were so near, so beautiful, and yet What was the hidden thing within the deep? I ask to know it only, then forget. 19

The Garden of Seven Trees

II

And I have asked of you the secret, love, And all your answer is a quiet hand Laid on my forehead, close, and now above Myheart. "Ah, you are good," you say. "Theland Woos to the deep, so I to you. I yearn For you because you yearn for me. Stars burn For night and suns for day." "And yet," I ask, "For whom do night and day perform their task? There is some ultimate." To which you place Your head upon my shoulder while the night Goes by and spreads the mist upon your face : Within the mist we wait, then, for the light.

Ill

And it shall come mist-shrouded; for I know That woman's beauty has not told its truth. "The topless towers of Illium," the ruth Of nations is not written on the snow Of any woman's breast. There sweetened milk Has drawn its traceries of liquid silk And half disclosed an awful history Writ in the utter runes of mystery. "Ponder the plain?" It is not all so plain; For what I give my life to, I possess, And it holds me beneath its fine caress. And out of all come life and death and pain.

go

The Garden of Seven Trees

A RONDEAU

Ten stars and ten clouds in the sky. And a moon like the skull of a crone. Oh, memory kneeling alone, While the winds and the clouds go by, While the clouds drift and the winds sigh !

Two castles with turrets on high, And owls in the turrets to cry. While the winds moan And mingle with mists on the stone. Ten stars in the sky.

Two flowers in the sleep-dusk of dreams, and I Fearing the gleam of the wings that fly Thitherward, thitherward all alone. Two flowers nodding in hands of bone. Thitherward, thitherward Let them die ! Ten clouds in the sky !

OUT OF SLEEP—

My love, my dear one is ill !

The winds mewl beneath the window and sicken

and scream; The water of the storm is bitter upon the pane; Night goes against the stars like black acid. 21

The Garden of Seven Trees

My love, my dear one may pass beneath the high arch of the morning;

She may go with the stars to their sleep,

With the little white stars to their slumber:

Whiter than these is her soul.

Her hands are thin mist in an orchard at bloom- time;

Her finger tips at my cheek are budded anemones in feathers of snowdrift;

Upon the pillow her hair is cedar-fire over white water :

I fear it will tempt the feet of the angels.

Her eyes sleep;

They are hidden under the curved petals of a strange flower;

In her eyes I forgot my soul;

If they do not open, God and her loveliness!

Night rushes against the stars ; It is bitter against the blown stars of the North. I hear the shadow of mighty tears at the window, And the wind reaching.

I must pray against the bitterness of death.

22

The Garden of Seven Trees

SONNET

No, not tomorrow let the great lamp fail

And love be desolate! Within the hall

Keep Joy, the moth, feeding among the tall

Flowers. Let music, nard-anointed, frail

Courser of the evening quiet light, veil

Memory with sleep that we may dream

This thing still is. And let thy incense stream,

Oh Power, over our couches low and pale.

War mouths that cling with moaning while they kiss,

Bosom to bosom struggling, all let be !

Our musky passion lightens but to flee;

Flame leaves dry ashes; Love will turn a-cold.

The world has yet no recompense for this :

That Life is not a thing the hand may hold.

A GRAVEYARD

I stood within the little yard A hundred years had flown

And stranger names about me rose On many a mouldering stone.

Here lay an infant and the one

Who gave the infant birth, A hundred years, a hundred years

Clasped in the common earth! 23

The Garden of Seven Trees

And here lay one whose years were sweet,

A mute line told her tale ; A hundred years, a hundred years

She slept within this vale.

Oh, that a maiden here should lie !

Her bosom was like snow, Her eye was bright and sunny blue

A hundred years ago.

I wept to hear the spring-time thrush

Sing in the hollow glen; I wept to think of youth, how sweet,

How frail, even now as then!

For one who had been near my heart

Had drawn toward the grave And love had known its bitterest grief :

It had no power to save !

The stones rose slanting in the sun,

How ancient was their woe ! The thrush sang gayly in the glen,

I turned my steps to go.

I sought her, frail and lingering sweet

Against my bleeding heart, My love, my bride, my holy one !

Her eyelids drew apart, 24

The Garden of Seven Trees

I kissed the dim light of her eyes, I kissed, and knew the pang

Another felt a century gone, While wild glen thrushes sang.

A century gone ! An hundred years And what shall my grief be?

A wild thrush singing in a glen, Upon a ghostly tree !

GYPSY GLEN

I left her standing at her door, and turned Away toward the hills. Yet was the sweet And awful vision of her face upon me; The too frail light of innocent agony Shone still between her laden lashes; and Her mouth was open like an angel's which Has wept a great cry thru eternity. Her hand lay flashing on her forehead pale. The delicate fingers scarce a-grip of life Mingling among the morning of her hair: Oh God, that life should leave the beautiful! Against the spread base of a somber hill Lay the low graves of some ancient in death; 25

The Garden of Seven Trees

A not unlovely place, and there I paused

Beside that city where a century

Had woven webs of old and human dream,

Which silently had worn themselves away.

The mouldering garth-fence, level to the feet

Of the intruder wind, invited me

By its own helplessness to enter there

Where the grey stones rose slanting to the sun.

Or lay, themselves with their sad message, lost

Among the weedy moulds of many years.

My foot was on the bed of stranger dust;

But not without an agony I looked

Along the desolations of the place.

And strove to read the testaments of love

Graven on time and by time's self destroyed.

Here most imperial maidenhood had come,

A flower upon her bosom, and to sleep !

And here sweet infancy lay in the breast

Of doubly-mothering earth; and here at last

Stout manhood's passion drew about itself

The silver of its age, and slept. Within

The distant glen a wild spring thrush poured out,

Most like the rills of paradise, his song;

And far he sat upon the ghostly tree.

And poured his hermit music down the glen.

With something of the duskiness of spring

The mighty depths of valley drifted slow

Among the hills, hills which with fallen trees

Snow-covered, lay like battle-ruined gods

The Garden of Seven Trees

Half skeleton beneath the sky. I went Under the ghostly tree and turned to look Where the long Ohio tugs among her mists; And turning yet again, like fire I saw The glen-rill near and fretting with the sun, Gleaming and glancing. Then upon my heart, Swifter than maiden's laughter and more soft Than her fellow-foot upon a path of dream, There swept the memories of that time when you, Frail holy one, went with me here among The flowers of long-gone summer days.

I turned A heavy eye upon those objects loved Under your notice— what a change was there ! All the raw outlines hewn by winter wind. Bare tree, bare stone, bare earth, and barren sky ! The root that split the rock and in its coil Held one slight maiden fern with violets near. Stretched thru a frozen convulsion of serpent

wrath, Like some earth agony made evident Out of the deeps of earth. And here where

grew The fairy maple with her red cap on, A slight child naid leaping up the dell. The oak, with his death whisper of dead leaves. Stood like a sacristan so iron old That my soul chilled as with immediate ice. Too heavy were the memories of the place, 27

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Weighting the heart and making weary all

The dumb pulse of my bosom: to breathe was

grief. Cold agony its dripping poison sent Like frosty hemlock creeping thru my veins, Slow, dreadful, holding still from absolute dark: A horror ! Stumbling thru the wind, I ran, Daring not to turn back and leave the glen. Nor to go forward where my holy one Might go no longer. The thrush his hermit song, A swift path up the valley's heaving side, Upward, and misery, now keen. My foot Here touched a winter fern, and here a burr Of sodden chestnut; and the waters fell Further beneath me, and the distances Grew white and awful till the mighty glen Lay swept with infinite pale light a-surge. Then on the valley's topmost ramp I stood. Like some mad Moldav slave, and looked below Where gleaming and glancing the glen rill fretted

the sun. Its voice now like so many airy bells Blown thru an evening twilight. There I sat. "Myself am a young slave, hauling an oar Within a galleon of black dreams. My fault, A soul impelled by visions, and my wrong, A heart wrapped with the silent cerements of An inarticulate ancestry. For these The gall chains and the oars of bitter woe !" 28

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Oh, holy one and frail and fair, I sat

Alone with my slave miseries ! Below

I seemed to see you walking in the white

Of beauty, and your hair lay on the wind

Like flame. A moment and the flowers rushed

Bowering your gleaming feet, and your fair hand

Was living in the flowers, your eyes aglow

With violets and roses. I could see

Your shell-like nostrils widen at the breath

Of lilies, and the lily pulse along

Your throat. But this was vision all. I wept.

The grey hills lay beneath me, altars old

Of ancient Maenad tempest. There was left

Bare tree, bare rock, bare earth, and barren sky,

And these alone and only these. I wept.

A cenotaph was all the earth and heaven,

And my heart was a little empty tomb.

And I the bearer of that fearful ark !

Oh God, that life should leave the beautiful!

The odor of her body was rich fruit !

And far the glen-thrush sang and poured his song

Down the long glen. The odor of her body

Was a rich fruit of utter paradise !

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EIGHTY DAYS

"For eighty days I'll trade with you,"

Said Death, "for all you hold Lovely." I sealed the trade. The blue

Of all the sky ran gold.

I took my bowl of blackened mead. Gulped it, saw hell, felt flame;

And all that earth, hating my greed Of Beauty, willed, then came.

Death put a vision in my hair.

Hung it before my eyes; Oh, it was pale and ghastly fair!

Its mouth v/as white with cries.

This bent my head, hurt, crazed my brain;

And, lo! for eighty days It shrilled the fearsome chants of pain

And whinneyed demon lays.

I paced the promontories dark

As bulls' horns in the sea, And fevered waves with snarl and spark Flung up their spears at me. 30

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I crept thru island canyons deep

With wail and bitter night; But never waking or asleep

Could lose that awful sight;

Till slow where writhing lava rings

The mountain like a snake, I heard the earth-heart where it sings,

And felt my own heart break.

"'Tis done," cried Death. "I've wrought my deed!"

"And wrought God's will," cried I, "For you who taught my heart to bleed

Have taught it how to die."

"Lo, at the last you've wrought me fair

A diadem of flame. And love has followed hidden where

My bleeding wild-foot came."

"Upon my sleep she gently waits,

And all that was is good. I go beyond the barless gates

To Beauty's brotherhood."

31

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SONNET

Come, now your nightshade and your roses

twine, Your Hhes and your deadly bough of yew. Cypress and oleanders, and the blue Mist violets with heavy moaning pine. Low sedges sweet and yellow celandine. Twine these and work out coronal and cross Against a bed of green and golden moss, For she is dead, the holy Alladine.

Meet is this loveliness, for lovely she

In her young maidenhood. She taught again

How beauty may fold up its heart in death,

And how life may continue in its pain

From lonely day to night, from breath to breath

Spending itself against eternity.

LO, ANYWHERE!

Last night you lay upon my bed. Across my heart your living hair; I marveled at the words you said :

"Lo, anywhere! Lo, anywhere!'

32

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I marveled at your whispering More light than any swallow's wing, More sweet than swallows when they sing And dart into the northern air:

"Lo, any where ! Lo, anywhere!"

Your breath came dewy at my cheek, It touched and clung like perfume there, Sweetened by that which you did speak: "Lo, anywhere! Lo, anywhere!"

I reached across the counterpane, All, all was night and all was vain! And yet I heard your voice again As tho it spoke in midnight prayer: "Lo, anywhere! Lo, anywhere!"

TWO POEMS ON THE SEPARATION I

I crept like Death into our room

And even like Death I snuffed the light;

My body sobbed within the gloom My spirit reeled against the night.

The windows moaned upon the sky Their pale despair of moon and star;

And thru my being shook a cry That came from far and very far.

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Like charnel dew I sought our bed, I sought our bed Hke charnel dew:

Oh God, oh God, that you are dead. And I not dead along with you!

II

Out of the night, a whisper, Out of the deep and the roll

Of the deep tides, a question To shatter my soul.

Out of the systems, a blinding And torture of vision, and lo !

Under immensities clinging. Moths and chill snow.

Snow flake and flake from the wing tip Loosened by all-mighty breath,

Down on my pale soul drifting, drifting Death!

A MARSH SONG I

Oh pale green star Wan with mist. Oh rose of the marshes, I keep my tryst! 34

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I go where the dews are ripe. The grasses tall, I go where the dews are dark The curlews call.

II

Never a whisper

Thru the purple vervain,

Under the red marish weed,

No whisper, none.

All is pain, all is pain,

All, all is done;

Under the red marish weed,

Never a whisper.

THOU LOVELY STAR I

Thou lovely star in the quiet sky,

Give me your peace and let me rest;

The day is gone and the shadows lie Hard on the heart I loved the best.

We'll go no more to our evening hill

Happy the days forever gone ! And you, dear heart, in the night, how still

Waiting the dawn, the great white dawn. 35

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The raw wet grave in the dark I see, You are beneath, that's all I know;

Beneath, forever apart from me. Star of the night, I go, I go !

II

"/ eternally see her figure eternally vanishing." J. K.

The clouds lie matted on the hill; Like hair of dead men old in pain Whistle the strands of winter rain,

And all my heart is cold and still.

Fair shape along the iron night

Taking your way with bleeding feet. You fade, and all your fading sweet

Burns like a death-star on my sight.

Where black the pouring midnight streams Or rolls in huge and ocean form. There sounds the thunder of the storm,

Hell-wild the iron tempest screams.

White demon of the curling blast. Again, again appear to me, Tho with your bleeding feet to flee

And tread the horror of the vast!

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My demon! Mine, whose angel eye

Is sunken in a violet tear.

Again, again to me appear, Tho but to vanish and pass by!

Show the white sorrow of your face !

The midnight steeps of terror break!

The smitten steeps oh love, forsake Not yet my awful prayer place !

The coils of tempest round you swing. Bleeding with death your feet move on ; You shudder thru the awful dawn

Eternal is your vanishing!

UNDER A ROSE

Under a rose in a garden of bloom

I have buried my heart,

And the winds come touching the spectral gloom

Of the garden rich and fair.

For a rose grew up in the garden of bloom,

And faded, and there

I have buried my heart.

Let not the night touch to the earth her lip

All dark and cold;

For under the earth, down under the mould,

Ah, the wind knows !

37

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Even, even as long of old,

In fellowship so sacred and sweet.

In fellowship closer than when hearts meet.

My heart and the rose.

Living and Dying,

My heart and the rose !

AVE VERUM— Mozart

Ave verum lowly, lowly

Lay her in the tomb; Ave verum slowly, slowly,

In her little room Rest her for her heavy sleeping. Rest her from her weeping.

Ave verum lovely, lonely

Fold her in the earth ; Ave verum she sleeps only.

Quiet from the mirth Of bells and wind. She wakes again Quiet from her pain.

Ave verum ever, ever,

Tho her eye was bright ! Ave verum never, never.

Waking in the night! 38

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Ave verum, ave verum,

Toll the heavy sound; Ave verum beauty dies, Ave verum beauty lies

Low within the ground.

BOUGHS OF MAY

A little luring pathway

Beneath the boughs of May,

And black-eyed song, and black-eyed son^

Away, oh, away !

The path leads thru the shadow. The path wastes thru the gloom. The gloom of blossoms perishing Against the moon. And all the little stars are out Like blood-buds on the sky, And all the fairies round about

"Come away, heart, come away, heart!

There's a bough of blossom high

Against the moon.

There's a bough of blossom-bloom

High against the moon!"

Oh, it's joy to be a-going, Beneath the boughs of May, 39

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To feel the jewelled blood come flowing

While the blossoms hang away

Against the moon !

Oh, it's joy to be a-going,

And I've worn the pathway true,

Joy, joy to be a-going

Back to you

An apple bough hung straight against the moon!

Is everything afire against the moon? Oh, my heart, be still and watch the dew ! Question not the night-bird where he flew, Nor the fire upon the feather tips That brushed against the moon !

A little luring pathway.

Luring thru the perfume and the gloom

Beneath the boughs of May,

"Yesterday, yesterday, and forever! There's a tomb beneath the moon, In the valley beautiful.

In the valley beautiful with boughs of May, There's a tomb beneath the moon, There's a tomb beneath the burning boughs of May'"

40

Ill

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MORTLING

My thoughts come Hke a Uttle Easter rain Flooding the pink cups of an April moss, And making a low murmur in the wood. In all my mind they swell with tender pain Food-waters in the rootlets of a flower And beauty, hidden, dim, not understood Haunts thru my being with the sense of loss, A wasted infinite within an hour.

II

Then mourn the winds among the sedge and brake, Coming from shores profound with death and dull With unpromethean clay. Oh dark and deep. Things wrought and things unwrought, what

sudden ache Now urges this your mournful movement here? Along the night you come with infant creep. Crying alone like a land-wildered gul!. And striking thru my breast eternal fear.

Ill

What is your seeking and what is your end, You thoughts that fall and sink and swell thru me Like primal substance in a weeping dew? 43

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What for my body's mortance do you lend?

For this my flesh is conduit intricate,

And you must work your fearful passage thru,

Tho costing me a deadly agony,

Toward what form, toward what formless fate?

FEVER

He hooked his leopard fingers Like burnt tongs in my hair;

He clawed me down thru forty leagues Of rotten red despair.

I heard the meermen's whistling cry, I saw their white-struck souls

Snarled thick in seaweed green as fire, Where the nether ocean rolls.

A ghastly heap in a bile-dark sea,

I saw the bones of men Heaved slowly round by conger eels:

They seemed to live again.

To dance a heavy deep-sea dance. With gawkish thumb and toe;

I reel to join them. Three times three, And down like death I go. 44

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A coral thigh-bone in my hand, A green weed round my throat,

And underneath my bristling neck The cold eels writhe and bloat.

A periwinkle on each eye,

A moon-shell at each cheek; A little meer-damned incubus

Sat on my breast to shriek.

The hooked tongs clutch; I hit the sun.

All golden wild he lay. And cuffed the gold froth from the waves

About a golden bay.

My breast grows sweet and ocean-cool;

The big wind shouts a song. And like a cask of golden ale

Landward I'm hailed along.

The sands burn opal at my feet,

The wood is windy-green; I pass thru emerald aureoles

In a forest all serene.

Thru banks of musky amaranth.

Thru aloe musks that cling, Thru brakes of orchids, censerwise

Which hang and burn and swing. 45

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And one blue dove moans softly On a strange blue-breasted tree;

I kneel, I lie a wind comes home, And the cool blooms cover me.

THE GHOST

The notes of the red cock pierced my window like pellets of carbuncle and struck into my chest;

Beyond the East hills Morning was combing her russet hair, and wild strands waved over the hills as she combed;

Then, suddenly, forming yourself out of the old light of Arcturus in my northern room, you. Ghost.

Silently, gathering white awe round you, pale, oppressive, malignant at first;

Then, moving nearer my bed, a maiden woven in cold opaqueness, smothering moon-snow drifting across my brain,

A wind-flower drifting back into an old forest of things anciently hidden,

Fading with mystical paleness out of my vision,

Gone!

46

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NOVEMBER WIND

The wind is all one spirit of regret

Wasting itself among the ruined leaves;

It seems that God has that He would forget, And that He cannot, lo, and that which grieves.

For surely this wild thing upon the earth, Rooting the midnight like a famished boar,

Is something of a spirit hid from mirth, A giant spirit, cosmic, aged, hoar.

And here it bruises all the mumbling hill. And there it tramples in the valley low;

It must be onward, it is never still; It has a heart of pain, and it must go.

How strange this woeful substance at the door Knocking where man lives ! he within the night

Trusting his little house and more and more Merely asleep and waiting for the light.

So sure if love is on his arm that all

Is well, so sure of his next little day And food and lips and laughter ! Wandering Call, Go by here, or go silent on thy way! 47

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EARTH

What winds now blow and what full thunders fall

Over the earth, moving her solemn way

With all her silent dead ! What a deep urn

Is she of her own dust, wrapped in what pall

Of spacious darkness ! Dreadful bosomed Mother,

Great grieving Niobe, while others burn,

Dark, dark your breast, and dark the tears that

smother The Eden of your cheek which gleamed like day !

Where lead you now your foot? The beggar years Bring their way-gathered burdens ; what your peace, Pacing a sad returning path like one Blackly bewildered in familiar fields ! Your long, long sleeping children round the sun. Asking but half-light, which he hardly yields. You bear, and tenderly hope they wake, nor cease Your dear pathetic quest, your parent tears.

THREE MEN

Three men sat in a book-piled room, Crossed their great hands and searched the gloom With deep and mighty eyes. The first Held life to be a thing accurst; 48

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The third of these exclaimed to say That hfe was merry, swift, and gay; The second only, slow to smile And slow to speak, remained a while Silent, and brooding deep as one Who had some mighty thought begun. Then lifting up his humble face. He spoke mild words of thought and grace : "Life is nor gay nor curst to me. But ricii with saving mystery. On Grief's dark front there hangs a jewel Which makes her countenance less cruel; And on the cheek of Happiness A royal rose for our caress. There is not in all Nature's plan An utter grief for any man ; And often some remorseful love Alone can lift the eye above The things that weight its vision down. The good have said, 'No cross, no crown'; And they are wise who hold it so. And learn the miracle of woe. Nor lives there in the heart of earth A pulse that leaps to utter mirth; For that is but insanity Which flies too wildly and too free. Rather the human bosom would Hold to the lovely and the good, Hold to the faith of hidden power, 49

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Hold to the consummating hour That shall reveal life's brotherhood. We know our joy thru blended tears, We trust the deeplier for our fears, For our best love we pay with pain, And for our sorrows love again."

AGE AND YOUTH

And there was one whom age with a grey hand Had taken round the forehead, that he wept. His eye was in the earth, his soul was dumb With many years, and round his drooping form An agony clung like a cloak of bitter rain. He, seeing me and marking that my face Was lifted to the wind, wailed after me :

"Ten years of passion and ten years of youth Are dead in you, ten years of song are dead. You had a love of white and awful power, That love is dead. You had a heart whose flame Was busy round the beauty of the world. And that heart lies in early ashes. You Clasped a dark rose against your bosom, crushed it On feeling of the thorn, and long ago Your blood grew black among its petals far On a far path. And once you raised a cry Of hunger in a city of wild men, 50

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A symphony of grief that they might hear

And learn your worship, and so save themselves.

But they nor heard nor turned nor cared to hear.

And you were left, your native faith alone

In fearful struggle with a monster power

Which killed and killed and killed and taught

you how Man may grow dumb in misery. Behold, I once like you had lips whose ready flame Rushed singing at the world, returning thence In bitter ashes. Once my eye was fire Against the stars, my head hung on the wind, My foot a wildling. But the years of earth Taught my clear eye to dim, my head to bow, My foot to tread the circle of a grey And midnight place. That whole divinity In which my youth cried brother to the world; And wrought its creed, and worked its faith, is gone. God drew behind the altars, and they fell. And He and they were nothing; and the beast Howled in the wood, and man howled like the

beast. Flowers fell panting and the world grew old. Youth, take the beaker of thy faith and drink Its fiery liquid up, and mock despair!"

And this one spoke and sought my eyes and smote His hand across them as he would have blessed, But being blind, he smote my eyes, and wept. 51

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And many a day I hoarded in my heart His heavy sayings, till my heart grew grey, And with an agony gave up its voice. Yet with the coming of the May I sang Again, then knowing better why he wept.

LINES ON BEAUTY

I went where all the towers of Beauty stood

And took my heart and placed it in a street

Near a swift minaret of jasper fire.

" Here," said my heart, " my prayer is answered me :

This minaret is benediction given."

Ah, I was happy for the choice it made;

For there were towers that slanted past the sun

And hurled their splendid cornices of gold

Into the eternal spaces. I was glad

As one who in his native city finds,

Among great palaces, at last a home.

Two mightiest towers, I saw the First and Last, And far between them swung the many years As tho some huge arachnid had spun out His web to prison time and all that time Has bred. And, lo! as with my eye I swept The measureless suspension, I beheld That naked Beauty held the First and Last, And that along the infinite gossamer, 52

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Various, glowing, mightily hued, there moved The same calm Loveliness, and all was one.

I have seen glory from the mountain top. And gathered beauty with ray hands from far And ancient seas. Where men in aeons old Have wrought strange mystery of written, pale. Eternal thought, or where with somber dream They died, there have I chosen long to be. Yet from it all, the passion and the sense Of life's vast iterance, the stern recoil Unto itself of the eternal norm, The pitiful pathos of the million towers Blown over by wild Iran's dust, I turn To the low quiet of the human mind. Within itself pacing the infinite height Whose wistful loveliness is God. And in The mellow-fruited sorrow that I find Packing my heart with Wisdom's melancholy, I best discern the Alpha and Omega Within whose large suspension lies the whole That I have been or I may hope to be.

CONJECTURE

The clouds like aged monks, bearing their stars. Enter the high cathedral of the night At holy time. Low in the western aisles, Over the silver altars Levite-pure, 53

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A radiant sacristan with censer curved Pours thick libation sweet as smouldering gold; And from her furthest transept field, and from Her dread confessional forests, lo, and from The anchorite basins of her deeps, earth sends Eternal incense up. At such a time, Impregnate with deep prayer, I mingle me With psalms of ceasing, low chaunts of the soul Seeking her loneliness, or seeking yet The infinite Beauty of the AU-in-All.

If there be vasts beyond the hot struck mind. Places of quiet, steadfast, strong, and whole, Eased of all urgency and undefiled By fevered scarlet and the white of pain. Give me to sink beneath the mellowing surge Of my poor passion and go down to them. Lo, I have loved and found and lost; and now The light that burned my forehead has gone out. Leaving a scar, and all my blood cannot Fashion one rose within my flesh. I am Grown old among a musky race of youth Who wash themselves in dew and, white of limb, Gleam toward desire, and have. Dimly I seem To gather one poor vision in my arms, One faded vision close above my heart If I might weep for her I yet would live! But being as I am I long to go Beneath the deeps, the whole and undefiled. 54

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AH, SAPPHO

Ah, Sappho, sweet Aeohan,

Warm panting still for Phaon's love. In Mytilene didst thou wear,

Mixt with thine olive, scented clove?

Soft! how the oleander bloom

Stains the wet marching of thy feet.

And how across thy double breast

The musk thorn bites the honey meat!

Passion's eternal phantom, thou. Behold me deckt with columbine.

And in my clenched hand, one rose, Dead as that palest flower of thine!

SNOW-MUSK

I have not known the brittle cup

That crashes with one evening's wine;

I have not known the scented grape That bursts upon the mid-noon vine;

I have not known the musk and nard Sweeting the flame of one mad kiss,

The one night's close delirium

That pants beneath a scarlet bliss. 55

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I've often thought, before I die

One night I'd eat and drink, and go

A-reveHng. But, ah, I've built My house upon a hill of snow!

THE SNOWS

Wet wind tears

Powdered with starlight,

Silvered and made splendid

By a tattered brocade of moonbeams,

Curiously fashioned

By tempest-struck chisels of steel.

Airy and keen,

Flee down the wind paths.

They make grey flowers in the sky

Against the breast of evening.

Like flakes of shattered pearls they scatter.

Interlaced,

Moving with passionate wonder.

At other times They are wings flung loose From the bodies of angels. They are the souls of God In flight. A rich red Music Gomes out of them 56

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Like a fresh voice singing Thru a golden trumpet. And then they are feathers of sleep Falling over the eyes of the world. Were you to hold up a Calla-lily And catch a deep trumpet full. You could not see them, They are so delicate and white.

They will cover all the city;

But in the morning men will walk on them

And they shall be mud in the streets.

BY AN EVOLUTIONIST

How shall one argue that the beast Is quiet in the man at last?

The senile sinew burns the least, The dew-drop in the heart is past;

And Age, who takes away the breath

Delivers man to spirit death !

"The hey-day in the blood is tame" And reason rules the passion down?

The passion is not there, the name Is broken-tissue, brain-of -clown.

No phantom off-spring burns the face

Of father heat or mother grace. 57

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Nor promise here of after life

That toils the brilliant slopes of time; But something less than ruddy strife,

And something paler far than crime: A dream that draws dim-curtained sleep About the mystery of the deep.

THE MOON WAS WHITE

The moon was white and very, very new,

The moon was white, almost as white as day,

When he left his play,

And made no track on his white way to sleep.

But all the white of pale snow moons can not

Fill my dark footsteps deep.

My footsteps that sink ever on the way,

The white way that my baby went to sleep.

THE DIM WATER

How golden was the day, And the night how golden. In those olden, olden times When we went to play Under the forest tree, Beside the dim water! 58

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Oh, the dim water.

The rushing dim water !

I did not dream that it would carry you away,

In those olden, olden times

When we went to play

Beside the dim water.

HIMERIUS TO SAPPHO

Aeolian Sappho, rosy-breasted Loveliness of the Paphian groves. Bind on thy heart the warmest lily, Bind it with bands, the gold-pure sweetness Of thy nightingale-woven locks.

Come with thy soft foot shadow-sandled. Sweet from thy bath, oh Lesbian daughter, Bearing the flower to my trembling heart-ache. Where I am waiting, rich oleanders Softening my couch by the sea.

White are thy limbs 'neath clinging moon-silver, Gleaming with pearls thy knees bend near me. Suddenly down thou dartest. O'er me. Burning my sense, thy bosom nestles. Crushing the lily against my heart, 59

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A SONG

Oh, sweet wild rose,

Tenderly you greet me,

Tenderly you meet me,

While all the wind is full of shadow

In the high tree bough.

Oh, sweet wild rose,

Alas! Who knows?

Is the thrush within the thicket

Is God's voice within the sky?

Far off I hear a cry,

"Beauty that endures.

Beauty that will die!"

Oh, sweet wild rose. Where is he who knows?

The winds are in the bough. And I am going now; I have seen you, I have loved you, And, good-bye !

HO

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BLUE-BIRDS

I heard three bhie-birds at dawn.

When sleep was leaving my eyes ; And my soul started up from her clean white rest,

And sang at the morning skies.

I heard three shadows at eve,

Come singing out of the wood ; And my soul had desire for her clean white rest,

And slept, for her rest was good.

A SONNET IN BLANK VERSE TO-

How softly Autumn comes unto these hills, Touching them with her infinite drer.ms of death. Like some tired nun of queenly heritage Who prays herself asleep, her vestments fine And various cast all aside. Yet here. Above the pathos of her passion pale, There linger high emblasted with old fire The coronals of heaven. Ah, to me This is the symbol sacrament of age Coming upon your lifted brow ! Even so Let it come quietly, with kindly light Searching away the loveliness of youth And gathering that good unto itself Which blesses down the heart with gentle sleep. 61

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ROCKS

(To Mother)

Except as fancy builds out of the deep,

And as faith forms, No dreams have I of infancy and sleep;

In gentle storms Of timid wildness visions rise and come From that one moment when young memory With young life locked her hand : Before all else is dumb, And after much is dead in me, And I a stranger in my own heart-land.

Yet from the pathos of that earliest time

I have a store of sweet and mouldy dreams,

Old things of mist that will not lend to rhyme Their substance, but like the deepening gleams

Of golden light, escape and are no more.

Disputing of her God,

With Nature I went out alone,

My lore

Only a child's heart;

And with a little rod,

Remembering Moses, I would strike some stone:

No water came; saddened I would depart.

In open fields I set up altars when My feet scarce bore my years; 62

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And many tears I let fall in those places. Turning then, Priestlike, I poured upon the wind The incense and the rapture of my mind; And often there

I felt the cold earth at my infant knee, And my heart chilled at prayer. The little piles of stone I'd scatter out again to where they lay. And ceasing there to pray, Once more I wandered on, wild, passionate, alone.

Yet even by these altars I began

To sense the ages and the life of man.

I left my woeful worship, and to school

I set myself with some crude native tool,

Rock against rock, and cracking rock

To know the heart hid in them.

Many a gem

I found, and laughed to feel the shock

Of my small hands breaking the stony lock

Of the ages. Wild and white

The wealth of open casques lay in my hand,

And I would smite and smite

And feel myself an emperor in the land.

Nor did my impatient wonder feed and cease Over the crystals of some ancient thing That dreamed and had its peace, 63

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Secure from tides that fall

On outward coasts, from tides long wont to cling

Upon the heaving breast of earth; and vain to

its low sleep The ocean voices when they call Out of the deep.

This holding in my hand, I often raised My eye to where on northern hills there blazed In mount fire, white clouds. These took A being might on them; I would look Saying, "The glaciers come again!" My soul leaped up with awe and pain. Treading the thunders paced in low stampede, While the old North Hurled forth

His ancient bergs. With monster speed. Ploughing the heaving bosom of the world These came, about them curled Wild lights, and on them mountains set Like puffs of dew, tho yet From their torn bases streamed raw lava gold. The earth grew cold.

A fantasy !

Often the great recoil Of the thundering land-bergs held me. Starting away, long day on day. With naked foot upon the naked soil Washed level by blown rains, I spent. 64

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A lore I had of birds who seek their spoil

After revealing waters fall, and my intent

Was to secure from rinsed fields,

Before the grain wove over them its green,

The treasure that disturbed Nature yields,

Secrets of buried children. And I sought

Not vainly for some place where red men wrought

In former times their labor, I have seen

Whole ridges near some running water strewn

With chips of shattered flint, half-hewn

Arrow-heads, great tips of spear,

Unfluted tomahawks cast down in fear

Or the last weariness. Each plough-scattered ring

That marked the workman's lodge, I'd view

With utter melancholy ; for the thing

Wove in me strange emotions new

Of life and death,

And the long failing of the body breath.

Her purer forms then Nature wrought About me, taught

Her fuller lessons till the faith in me Might rise and wrestle with its wing Against the spirited air, and fling My soul above the lower mystery Of life. I well recall One place most dear of all. Where I held my communion, Felt true the deep reunion 65

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Of my being with all being. A place

Of trees where twin brooks run,

Where flowers woo open to the sun

Of every Spring;

Where thrushes sing,

And where one well might hope to meet God face

to face. There while an evening fell, And the mild hare-bell Hung its frail cup of blue, Filled with the gentle dimness of the night, I knew

My vision, and the light I am to give came swiftly to my eyes : The stern emprise

Of seeking Beauty fell upon my soul, And made it strong and rapturous and whole.

LINTELS OF THE SUN

I am lonely on my hill,

I have gathered many flowers;

But the moments tarry still. Tarry still the weary hours.

Did you smile but to deceive

Grief that trampled in your heart?

If you did then I must grieve. Grieve and weep and so depart. 66

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Were you happy but to say

Words that paused within my ear? If you were I must away,

Far away nor hnger here.

Is it that the Hly fades

Where the rose is spread in bloom? Let me then seek valley shades,

Vailey shades and valley gloom.

I am lonely on my hill,

Lonely thru the weary hours; Shall I linger weeping still?

I have gathered many flowers.

SONNET TO-

She drank so greedily the day of love

That night came doubly soon to her. Where late

With golden horn under a golden sun

She sat, now shadows swarm, and dimly great,

Huge shouldered things push at the hills. Above

The place a windy star, and only one.

To her time is a heavy-footed thing, Toiling down hills with dusty urns outslung Along his side. There where the years have sung Their ancient psalms of old remembering, 67

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He moves with his great burden. Outward swing The mighty casques, bumping among the flowers Their aged belhes. After him the hours, The hours, the infinite hours go toihng.

THE CANDLE

The wax of the candle

Lies in strips and splatters

Along the page where you bent to read.

I remember how red and tall the candle was

When I lit it your face beyond the flame

And how curiously thru the night hours I watched

the wax Drip, drip, drip out of the little gutters at the

rim of the candle. At half past one a horror took me : It was lest you should read What I had written at half past one the night

before. Then I don't know why I tore my note book open at the very place. You read, holding the dripping candle. I felt the words cringing beneath the wax Raw from the wick : The cut of your hand against my cheek, The cut of your words at my heart hurt not

so much.

68

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Until the gusty morning

I stared across the page at the candle

Where you had left it.

When the sun shone

I saw nothing there but a pool of congealed

Blood-like wax, with a bar of wick fallen in it,

Across the page with its strips and splatters :

Thin red serpents in a field of carbuncles !

TWO TRIOLETS

I The tinkle of a mandolin

Along the waves of moon and white, I hear it far and clear and thin,

The tinkle of a mandolin. Well I recall what might have been

Another such a moonlit night: The tinkle of a mandolin

Along the waves of moon and white.

II

Beneath the yellow tamarind

She stooped to soothe her low guitar, And round her breast the loose scarf pinned,

Beneath the yellow tamarind Shimmered like star-gold wrought and thinned

By sapphire shadow. Oh, lost star ! Beneath the yellow tamarind

She stooped and struck her low guitar ! 69

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REMEMBERING

Is it the scent of the cedar bower

Or the hour of the moon

That works in my breast?

Is it the beating of wind-strown waters.

The song of the daughters of foam

That has taken me home and given me rest?

I can not tell,

But the calm in my heart I know full well.

Is it the song of the pitiful bird

Overheard in the night,

The sweet of despair?

Or is it a memory ancient and olden,

The long ago golden light of your face

As here in this place you loved me, my fair?

I can not tell,

But the calm in my soul I know full well!

II

You lifted my eyes

To the lion, to the bear;

And now all the skies

Are asking, "Are you there?" 70

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The waters of the deep

By the shoreUne of the night

Are falUng asleep:

"Who is waiting in the hght?"

The earth shudders thru

All the arteries of her breast:

I weep to think of you, And weeping, rest.

Ill

I cannot doubt that now alone

You wait the evening from the field.

You pluck the moss upon the stone, You pluck the stone that will not yield.

The lark among the clover blooms

With one hushed twitter goes to sleep,

And from the valley float the glooms. And from the marsh the vapors creep.

Nor yours nor mine the fault that now We cry against the winds of night:

Life is not measured by a vow. And vision measured not of light.

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DEAD I

The beauty of your eyes was like mist

Sunk in moon pools ;

The beauty of your spirit was about you

Like odor of orchids ;

Your laugh was a little star

Singing above paradise.

Now you are dead.

II

The waters of your little lake Are pale laughter; About your little chateau There are shadows ; In the shadows There is silence :

You are dead.

Ill

The blue-bird that you loved Has closed his bill, He is gone.

The violet that I pluckt Is sweet mould By your pathway : You shall not tread on it more: You are dead! 72

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TO

Within the tomb of years I halted pace To gaze upon each dead embalmed face, To reckon once again the form, the grace.

And here were some whose cerement blossomed

white, And here were some whose cloth was as the night, And here upon one brow rested eternal light.

In that great light I saw God's blessing glow On two whose love was lily and pure snow But that was long, ah, very long ago !

Then up there rose each dark and fearful form : They thrust their fingers in the light yet warm, And chilled it, and closed on me like a storm.

I wonder often if you yet would see A passion in this tale, close mystery. Or turning, if you'd say, "Why, this means naught to me."

73

MARSEA

The Garden of Seven Trees

MARSEA

THE PEOPLE OF THE POEM

An Old Man Marsea's Father. An Old Woman Marsea's Mother. Marsea a young woman. Malatestaa an older woman,

friend of Marsea

THE PROLOG ITS SETTING,

The V!Ood is dark and heavy with its oum shadoii). The disproportionate immensity of the trees and the rocks sloioly appalls the sense and presses it at last to a state of incuhus and agony. Among the trees, like a broken gray serpent, lies an old pathway. Two persons only can he seen: an old Man sunken upon a stone, an old Woman leaning upon a staff. When they speak their voices seem larger than they, and are hollow and toneless with extreme age and weariness.

OLD MAN

No, no. There is no use.

OLD WOMAN

We must go on.

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OLD MAN

No.

OLD WOMAN

But she—

OLD MAN

Is lost. There is no use lost !

OLD WOMAN

Lost ! We must go on.

OLD MAN

The shadows Are too deep.

OLD WOMAN

Come, Father, come.

OLD MAN

She said her soul was lost. There are So many ways to what is lost.

OLD WOMAN

Come!

OLD MAN

I am afraid. My child !

78

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OLD WOMAN

My child! Marsea! Marsea!

OLD MAN

Marsea!

(They go on weeping.)

THE CULMINATION OF AN INCIDENT.

A well of black ivater in a pit among cypress trees. Upon the lips of the well, cutting thru black mosses, are twelve red flowers. Marsea is sitting clutching one of these flowers at its root.

MARSEA

Beauty is blood ! It was not told Me so. Beauty is blood ! I'll have The secret of you from the root. Or lower still, from the black sands, Hued nightly darker by the seep Of mists thru these thick mosses. So !

{She Digs)

Yet, yet no secret out ! A little wild earth mumbled at My finger's end, where stood but now The complete delicate being. So now you die, alive or dead, 79

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Beautiful ! Then beauty grows Not from the earth it feeds on, No, nor hves, but being dead. Remains !

{She suddenly casts the flower to the central quiver of the well)

The tip of the breast of death ! Moving with the hidden spring Of death ! Now the long pale stem, Lying timorous for a moment, Sinks, and downright, like a shaft Piercing the spring, sucks from it, till The flower, drawing a heavy color. Sinks. How black and deep these waters !

MALATESTAA

(from among the trees) Marsea !

MARSEA

You!

MALATESTAA

My lovely friend!

MARSEA

Ooh!

MALATESTAA

Weeping? Sweet, sweet and wretched! 80

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MARSEA

Why did you come?

MALATESTAA

T knew this place, And feared.

MARSEA

And feared?

MALATESTAA

Feared. A little White flame rose from my spirit And led me here : you are my hunger And my fruit.

MARSEA (avoiding)

Look there ! Look there !

MALATESTAA

The uncharneled ghost of the moon, wasting Along the wistfulness of day. Even so he showed himself that time, My woman heart its vestment dim Of older years tore suddenly off, When, pale with wonder, lily-like We stood, fronting each other with Our naked souls; and unabashed We gave into each other's eyes What maidenhood might keep from God. 81

The Garden of Seven Trees

MARSEA

The time, the time. I never feared As then I feared, till now.

MALATESTAA

What fear?

MARSEA

In the imperial crown Of the zenith heaven that night I saw Two great gems loosen and, amazed. Whirl in the purple field until. Clashing, the great round shook; And one alone returned to sit Upon the dusky forehead of The night.

MALATESTAA

So to commemorate

Our union the celestial flames

Unite in regal purity.

MARSEA

And when that night, weeping, I came To the blue w. 11 of Nadir deep By the tarn of Shadows, you arose And took me; and you spoke of beauty Till the frame of the wide universe Thinned its huge substance into spirit; 82

The Garden of Seven Trees

You spok? of truth until the heart Of earth, hurled from its sling of mist. Rushed ruining thru the inane dark; And all that night the rose-crowned jewe' Burned in the well, and all that night I wept.

MALATESTAA

Your tears were brighter than The tears of sandarac, sweeter than The tears of mastic, and more dear Than all the tarn gems glancing deep Into the infinite night.

MARSEA

After,

Alone upon the Hill of the Kingdom, Among memorial emblems of Your love, and munerary winds Whose gift was the sweetness of the cedar, 1 saw at race along the steeps Of upper air, a golden bird Crying distressfully, and a great Cloud of hawkish shape whose wings Touched at the East and West. These made Their straining way across my vision Until the sweet bird, failing at The misty maw of the falcon tempest. Uttered such agony that all 83

The Garden of Seven Trees

His breast burst streaming on the wind, And the cloud took him. {She weeps)

MALATESTAA

Was this the time the white star, Rising against the North in snow And pearl, suddenly wheeled and fell Across the heavens, striking the southern Pole in a red tempest, green About its hollow throat?

MARSEA

The time!

And under visions we went to The sea, and visions crept around us In the cave of Love low by the sea. And maiden wraiths of vision swept Our shaHop to the sea, and all The sea rose in a vision round us While we floated among the pearls And fantasies of etherial green. And when at last a frail mist rose, Lifting our shallop out along The jade-pale crests of the deep, you cast One flower into the fair moon-azure Drifting along our prow. All night The flower moved on the samite waves Dreamily shoreward, and all night I watched it dipping under the long 84

The Garden of Seven Trees

Pale crests of pearl, until a whisper Of sands came underneath us and We stepped among the murmuring shells Along the shore. There as we turned We saw the flower high-shaken in The hoar mane of the last vexed wave; Then while the deep moaned, stricken Across its bosom with wide flame, The flower drooped down, a moment lay Burning the wild opal of the sand. And passed into the deep.

MALATESTAA

I knew

The morning came and caught the white Of sea mist from our hair; I knew Your brow was white and white your hands. Only your eyes were living as You sat among the weed-laced shells ; And in them the frought phantoms gleamed Working in mimic mystery The passions of your soul. I spoke. And at my voice your heart swooned In one long pitiful sigh. You rose, And like a babe bare-footed on The winds of sleep, all tenderly You lead me here, in innocence Resting upon my bosom till You sank to deeper realms of dream. 85

The Garden of Seven Trees

MARSEA

1 dreamed. I never told the dream.

MALATESTAA

Your being weakened, and your body Lay like a faint sob shuddering Against my heart.

MARSEA

Too great to bear ! Mad with the thick writhing of The abortive thought of sleep ! You sat On a high place, a windy sun Coronal round you. Over the white Of your shoulder a bronze-dim harp Curved its wild throat. Your hand wrought Gleaming upon the gleaming strings. Unweaving long tresses of music "Which darted and flashed down the wind. These came under the valley boughs. Touched me, bound me like gossamers, Lifted me thru the violet air, And bore me upward. Dizzily, Meshed with the mad light, my pulses Beating under your hand, I came Toward you. Then as I came the silks W hich bound me, fearfully coiled, bloated And bulged at my throat and hurled me. Eying, into a black wind 86

The Garden of Seven Trees

That rushed thru yourharp strings, pressed me there While your gleaming nails cut into my heart. I waked ; your bosom held me; my eyes Went to the depth of death. I knew My horror, for I waked and it Remained as when I slept.

MALATESTAA

Oh friend,

Into whose heart, lacking of husband

And of babe, I poured the pent

Languors of maidenhood, the full

Unquickened and unmilked life

Of woman, all those natural powers

Of passionate being, which compressed.

Unloosed, sought you the wilder way

In me, unnatural lived and mad

To spend my impulse, why must you

Be wretched in the impregnate love

Which springs from my charged bosom round

You purely?

MARSEA

I have told my visions And my dream of visions.

MALATESTAA

Rest

But again where rest for you was sweet, And for me the uncharging of my soul

87

The Garden of Seven Trees

MARSEA

Never again in that sweet place May 1 give up my heart to dream And peace. Most tender is it that A maiden leave a maiden when Both love, and when around them The stars have wrought their witcheries.

MALATESTAA

Remember but that better time

When low in whispering husks the ripe ear>

Hung, and when the South pressed keen

At the wing-pits of the birds, and they

Were glad to go. You went with me

Among the jewel- weeds and the gold

Marsh daisy, the purple vervain and

The sweet milk-lavender, across

The cricket and sun-singing fields

MARSEA

My death was hidden from these things; And they were beautiful, as they Shall be.

MALATESTAA

Remember but the rains In the sweet cedar, and the winds That filled the night. Oh remember 88

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The wet leaves fallen like a golden Shadow about the trees, and The stars among the shadow-leaves At night!

MARSEA

These things are for the years, And they shall be. Have 1 not burned To have one beautiful thing within My keep and hold? I once did weep Two days and nights over a rose Fading beneath my tears, and they, My very tears tore the sweet petals From their place and lay with them, Mocking their own sad source. Beauty Is blood !

MALATESTAA

I do not understand.

You are going far from me ; I cannot

Feel you near me any more !

MARSEA

These trees are large, reaching out Above the night.

MALATESTAA

Their tips are silver.

MARSEA

These waters here are dark and deep. 89

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MALATESTAA

The sands they rest on are of gold.

MARSEA

I had my visions and my dream Of visions. It was you who taught Me truth and you who taught of beauty, And you consumed rae.

{Mar sea leaps into the well.)

END OF THE INCIDENT THE EPILOG

The Old Man and the Old Woman on another portion of the pathway.

OLD MAN

The shadows are too deep, too deep !

OLD WOMAN

We never shall find her! We never shall find her'

OLD MAN

We are all lost, lost ! {He sobs)

OLD WOMAN

Why are you laughing?

90

The Garden of Seven Trees

OLD MAN

I am not laughing.

OLD WOMAN

What was it that I heard?

OLD MAN

I do

Not know.

91

ALLADINE

The Garden of Seven Trees

ALLADINE

Part 1

An April morning the castle gate

Is wide to the wind, and standing there.

Singing a wild song, Alladine,

Alladine, the great earl's daughter.

Fair to see. Her silk-white gown

Is blown by the wind, and her red red hair

Is backward blown, and moving with wind

Makes living flame on the marble gate.

High her bosom and deep her eye.

Her lips two red harps arched with song,

And paler her cheek than the tumeric pale.

And her hands in the wind two lilies floating.

Around the castle a deep, deep wood

With a black tarn sunk in its heart; and thru

Its aisles of umber the hunter going

With cross-bolt set and with cross-bow draw

For oft at night a great owl floats

Over the tarn hoot-to-hoo,

And rattling rise from the deep To clash their fine castanets Of splintered and clapping thumb, 95

The Garden of Seven Trees

To dance a lean dance to and fro

Under the green of a windy moon.

But sweet is April! A fairy bough

The dog-wood Hfts in the leafless wood,

And the cherry wild, the cherry wild.

White in the evening with drifting bloom!

Therein the nightingale is wont

To seal her wings with the amber dew.

To lay her breast in the pale blooms deep,

And touch her heart to the world's true pain.

Tremble the blossoms, the lilies tremble

Far in the vale, and the wild rose weeps,

And the white- veined birch is stricked with stars

That glance thru the dark of the larch and over

The willow sweet as a sea-fountain foaming.

A voice at her ear, for high her song; A voice, a whisper, and wide her eye :

"Oh Alladine, fair Alladine, Sing with your lips like red harps arching; Your cheek shall be more pale, more pale Before another Spring-time's breaking!"

There breaks the blue of the distance a rider, Shot like a star from the hill-ridge green; Flame in the azure, a herald galloping. Galloping, galloping. The king's flag hung 96

The Garden of Seven Trees

At his trumpet's throat, a fringe of purple Makes of its edges wearing with wind. He plunges him down in the larchen valley, And up from the valley he rushes like May, And now he sits by the great earl's draw-bridge, Sounding a blast on his pearl-dark horn. In answer the watchman's trumpet. Down The draw-bridge clangs; the charger neighs; His gleaming feet on the dim oak thunder; And low saluting fair Alladine, The herald enters the marble gate.

Out the great earl strides from the castle With pursuivant and herald before him, A mighty man. And the king's herald speaking: "My master, tlie king, sends me. Earl Gray, " "Your master, my master. Speak!" says the

earl. "Have we not tended our marches well, Fought the heathen, our tribute paid?" "Right well, stout Earl; and our master, the king, Holds you highly, the which to prove He rests his love in your courtesy And comes with his queen and his court to you. For he hears that the white stag roams your wood, And he hears, oh Earl, and I speak it freely, The praise of your daughter Alladine, Fair Alladine, your only daughter. Whose voice is a northern rill in the sun." 97

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So speaks the herald; the great earl laughs;

And AUadine, hearing, catches her hair

In from the wind, and one white hand

Strikes to her breast and arches and gleams.

"Fair Alladine, your only daughter,

Whose voice is a northern rill in the sun"

"So," she thinks, "the great king spoke,

And the great queen heard him and all the

court!" And hard she presses her hand to her bosom.

Fair Alladine is high in a tower.

Watching the way the king will come.

Singing, and watching the worn green way,

Singing, and listening the echoes sweet

That come from the castle towers around.

Bound is her hair in a golden braid,

Bound her breast with a cincture of gold.

And round her waist a band of gold.

And her feet in golden sandals gleaming.

Fair is Alladine to see

As she sings and listens the echoes fall

Back from the towers like low applause

Fresh and sweet to her shell-turned ear.

"The white stag roams the wood," she sings,

"Lin-et, lin-o, lin-u," she sings,

"And the king has heard of my voice," she

sings, "And the king has called me fair." 98

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The scarlet blast of a trumpet gleams,

And Alladine is mute the while;

A slight crenel holds all her beauty,

The grey dark merlon feels her hand.

Into the wood and out of the wood,

The king is riding among his train

His purple banners welted with gold,

And heavy they move deep under the sun.

The inner courtyard gate, it swings;

The outer courtyard gate is swinging,

And out the earl, pursuivants, heralds.

Spreading gold cloth, pale skins of the white

hart Over the way that the king will come. Trumpets low beating, thin, sweet laughter Rising among the turrets high: The earl is kissing the queen's own hand, The earl is kneeling low to the king.

Gracious the king: "Kneel not, my Earl.

My love would hold you of nearer worth;

And of my love dearest hostage I give.

My queen to your hospitality.

Yet why lack we here your daughter fair.

Whose beauty should grace our welcome

royal? Tonight I shall crave her a song for my queen, And see that she wear this necklace wrought Of wild white diamonds close to her throat." 99

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On the dog-wood bough and the wild cherrie,

Long the nightingale sounds her song;

The great moon goes up into the sky,

And the winds fall out of the sky and cease.

It is early evening and near the time

When the bellman shall sound the feast of the king.

"The king's own diamonds, bright are they!"

Thinks Alladine in her castle bower,

"And well shall I sing for my own sweet queen.

And all shall mark me and hear me sing;

The nightingale in the wild cherrie

Shall hush and harken only to me."

She lifts the necklace, she holds it high; Wild, white and wild the sweet light flies And beats and pulses and swims in her view Under the red and the thickening gold Of the candle gleam. A moment, then The great gems close to her throat she binds, And wan are they, her throat so fair; Out laughs she softly, so pleased is she. And warbles a lyric repressed and sweet. Until her throat and the gems together Live like white water beaten with sun, A northern rill in the white sunshine.

Wide the hall, the great torch flaring. On jewel-struck branch the candle high, 100

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And high the windy censer burning. With flashing cup the great board set, Woven with gold the women's hair, And a twinkhng hilt at each noble's side.

Loud the laughter, the rough, free joy,

And the king arises and calls for song:

"A song from our north-land nightingale.

Our Earl's fair daughter, AUadine;

A song from her, a lyric gay

To fit the ear of my lovely queen."

Earl Gray is rising; his daughter's hand

He takes, and leads her high in hall.

To a lifted place set round with bowers

Of the dog-wood white and the white cherrie.

So bowered she is with sweet and fair

That the good king laughs and tosses his wine:

"Behold, my queen, a nightingale

More fair than ever you did see,

A nightingale in the white cherrie!"

So smiles the queen; and Alladine

Hears pulses beating one, two, three,

And lifts her voice in a lyric gay.

A white hart roams the green wood thru,

Lin-et, lin-o, lin-u A white hart roams the green wood thru. And the king is riding in scarlet and blue,

Lin-et, lin-et, lin-o, lin-u. 101

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"Now who can draw me the longest bow?"

Lin-u, Un-et, hn-o. "Now who can draw me the longest bow, To fetch me this hart, I fain would know?"

Lin-u, lin-et, lin-o.

"And that can I," says Fingeret,

Lin-o, lin-u, lin-et. "And that can I," cries Fingeret, And he shoots with his bow, does Fingeret, But the white, white hart is roaming yet,

Lin-o, lin-u, lin-et, lin-et.

There rises the queen and all arise,

And from her own sweet breast she takes

A broach of heavy gold, deep set

With rubies four, and rimmed about

With sky-blown sapphires fair. She flings

The token, and others fling of broach

And necklace and chain and ring

And nuggets of gold from the snow streams pickt.

And raw gems gathered on far warm shores.

Until fair Alladine is standing,

Her white foot set in a pool of gold

And her ankles wrapt by chains of pearl:

A fountain she of high white fire

Bursting from deeps of crystal flame.

The bellman has freightened the drowsy owl Who sits by the bell in the high hall tower. 102

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Fair Alladine, the earl's one daughter.

With the kiss of the king on her cheek, is standing

Alone in her chamber, while the night

Breathes vainly of rest thru her casement high.

And far in the East a pale wind gathers

Itself into hints of roses and dawn,

"The white stag roams the wood," she sings,

"Lin-et, lin-o, lin-u," she sings,

"And the king has heard my voice," she sings,

"And the king has called me fair!"

She loosens her hair of its golden braid,

The cincture of gold from her breast she flings.

And from her waist the band of gold.

And her feet from the golden sandals gleaming.

Oh fair, oh fair is the earl's one daughter.

And down she kneels on the rushes sweet

Where her jewel cask foams, and swift her hands

Burst into the deeps of emerald, amethyst,

Onyx and opal, jade, ruby, and pearl.

Of windy sapphire and diamond wild,

Until she laughs and winds her arms

With the vine-long chains, and lifts her hands

Full foaming with gems to her throat so fair.

A tap at her door an owl at her casement ; She startles, a coronal slips thru her hair. A tap at her door of a withered hand; She asks at the door for the knocker's name. 103

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"The fairy mage of the king am I,

Old and wise, very wise am I;

Open, fair Alladine, let me in."

Fair Alladine listens her heart; says she,

"Why do you come? why want you in?"

"You sing like the nightingale, Alladine,

Open, fair Alladine, let me in."

The door is open, the withered mage Like the green of the morning enters the room; He touches the candle and dims its light, He sits in the rushes and rolls his eyes. "Now speak you fair to a maiden fair, Since now I have let you enter in." The owl at the casement snips his beak. Drops thru the night and is gone.

"Eat," says he, "the tender tip Of the tongue of the nightingale."

Fair Alladine to hear these words In wonder sits and listens her heart.

"Eat," says he, "the tender tip Of the tongue of the nightingale."

And no more words than these he speaks. And the red cock crows, and out at door The wizened mage is vanishing. 104

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"But wherefore, wherefore, fairy mage?" "You shall sleep and dream." he goes.

She lies her down on her own sweet couch; Its touch is full of sleep; she dreams. The candle sputters, the witch-hood nods. And woe is her for the dream she dreams.

END OF PART ONE

105

ALLADINE Part II

The Garden of Seven Trees

ALLADINE

Part II

The great earl's hunters, a score strong men, Are summoned in hall. Their mantles green Are tucked thru bugle bands of gold, And white their long bows shoulder-slung. "Now God be true to bowmen strong! And why be we here?" says Fingeret. "The beech-nut swells with honey-fat, The acorn swells above its cup. The fawn is weak on its milky hoof, And why be hunters summoned in hall?" "It is to let the long shaft fly Its white way thru the beech so green," Says one, "to slaughter the day-light owl."

There enters in haste the mighty earl. And his eye is great beneath his brow. "Hark ye," he says, "my huntsmen all, For I speak of my daughter Alladine, Whose heart is ghosted and wild and sweet. Whose voice is a north-white rill in the sun. She sings at morn before the cock. She sings at noon, she sings at night; While the glow worm paces the leaf's mildew 109

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She sings in her sleep to her casement moon. And here be coming from court and hall, From castle and court and outmost hall, Duke, baron, and count, marquis, and earl, And the king's own son to hear her sing. Hark ye, huntsmen, break your bows, Shear in twain your amber strings. Break your shafts, your quivers shatter. And off, off all with this beechen green. Plain suits of black from this you wear, Sandals of fawn-skin softer than leaves. And when you hunt, you hunt with the springe."

"Right noble Earl," cries Fingeret, "And I shall break my good long bow! God's curse! Ript out of the black ash heart By a tempest bolt this bow of mine; And so be I struck when on my knee I bend it but to shaft and string!"

The mighty earl he strides one pace, Fingeret before him lies, The black bow broken across his throat. "God's curse! and be you hunter of mine, You hear my will ! For she dreamed a dream. And you shall do as I bid you do. For she dreamed a dream you cannot know." Each hunter snaps his good long bow. 110

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"Now get you suits of black, my men,

Sandals of fawn-skin softer than leaves.

And get you springes, the forest thru

Set them and take the nightingale.

Nor harm them wholly; but clip their tongues,

Of each the tip, and bring the tip,

And these shall be my daughter's food;

For she dreamed a dream that ye must not know."

"And well must she sing," cries Fingeret, "Who eats of the tongues of nightingales! "And well must she sing," cries Fingeret, "Who would sweeten the silence she makes but

The huntsmen are going silent from hall :

Their long bows lie where they throw them down,

Their quivers spilling the long shaft lie,

Low the silver-lipped bugles lie.

And the gold cords curl in the mantles green.

"Well must she sing," cries Fingeret,

"Who sweetens the silence that comes but now!"

A black wind mumbles beneath the moon And fills the dark wood with its sound; A shadow is wild on the windy night, And a whinnying cavalry break the trees; But here are forms more dark than wind Who feel the touch of the night, and go 111

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Silently here and silently there,

Alone beneath the demon boughs,

Boughs that cross and clap and whine

Like quarter staves in strong wrist play.

It is a night of wammer and wailing,

And over the tarn in the heart of the wood

The great owl swoops and shakes the mist

With wail and hoot and snick and sneer;

And the ghost men rise and shake their feet

Of slippery bone on the cold tarn's eye,

And clap their hands and clash with their breasts

In dance and rondel of nadir hell,

A dance to a whistle-bitten tune

Blown shrill from sockets of toothless jaws.

Blown out of a cave where the tarn-men sleep.

So thru the night the hunters toil. Their springes set, and take the bird Of sweetest tongue, and clip the tip Of the tongue and loosen the bird again. The forest has for all its woe. No voice, and silent weeps alone.

With the wan night over their faces, the hunters, Fawn-sandaled, return at the green of the morn- ing, And the kitchens steam with a golden broth, And Alladine, the earl's one daughter. Sings and sips of the golden broth. 112

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Sips and sings and langhs the while That the rude swain halts his ox to hear.

The Prince is coming, the earl Du Care,

And many a knight and baron bold

Are coming to hear fair Alladine

Sing in her hall on festal day.

Long the hunters have toiled that night,

And each a nightingale has taken,

And Alladine has drunk riglit well

Of the golden broth, and makes to sing

x\s never she sang a golden song:

All night an owl at her casement sat,

Snippin/j the bones of a lesser bird.

"Wine, wine, red wine! Pour till the horn

Is rosy at lip, and the red froth winks

Away in pearls down its slippery side!

Wine, wine, red wine! And drink, my squires,

Drink till the burning beaker is cold,

Down, down to the fairy iVlladine!"

So the Prince, for the feast is set.

And he clashes a horn with the earl and drinks.

The earl's own daughter is rising in hall, But what is that which touches her eye? Is it the witch-mist slowly drawn Round the woven paces of Death's lank meri Who dance to a wliistle-bitten tune? 113

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Nor sees that eye the huntsman dark

Who weaves his way among the wood,

Who bends to the springe, and the sweet blood

leaps To the heart of the ghasted asphodel! For she has dreamed a wondrous dream, And she has drunk of the gold-red broth, And her sweet tongue lives beneath a song That startles the diamond in her red hair, And the ruby low in her fairy throat.

There is a golden forest

Where the low white breezes blon% Where the sun wakes, and the moon wakes.

And where wild waters flow.

There is a golden forest,

And it is fair to see; For flowers are there and birds are there.

And the white winds are free.

There is a golden forest,

And who would call me fair. And walk with me and talk with me

On the sweet green pathways there?

There is a golden forest

Where the white wind is low, And the full white moon, and the white flower.

And where I must go. 114

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The Prince is standing with his eye

Right round and wholly bright to see;

His wine glass tips, and his jewelled hand

Lies burning in the red, red wine.

"Fair Alladine, I do entreat,

What means your song of white and low?"

Her hand at her throat, she speaks no word;

Fair Alladine is sinking in hall;

The great earl starts, and on his breast

She sinks and weeps a woeful tear.

The guests rise up and quickly go.

"My own fair daughter, Alladine, Why weep ye now so sore, so sore?" "My father, my father, I do not know; But the owl all night at my casement sat Snipping the bones of a lesser bird; And my voice is faint within my throat. My tongue too weighted with gold to sing. Ah woe is me for the dream I dreamed!"

The night is come, and Alladine Is lonely in her high hall tower; Her sick heart fills her breast with tears, And a naked wind stalks moaning round. From far she seems to hear a wailing That bites at her ear like a viper green : And prayer comes thick within her throat. But her tongue hungers and cannot pray, 115

The Garden of Seven Trees

And the rushes sweeten beneath her tears

As she kneels and hungers and strives to pray:

"Oh, Mary, my Mother," she strives to pray,

"Oh, Mary, my Mother!" she can no more.

For still from far she hears a wailing

That bites at her heart like a viper green,

And her heart so broken and sweet with pain

Rises stark and strikes in her breast

A bitter stroke: she makes to go.

The candle sputters, the witch-hood nods

To the black draught drawn thru the open door.

And Alladine creeps down the stairs. Along the mumbling hall she creeps. Into the night of cold deep stars. And wakes the porter at the gate. "And who are you?" "Sir, I am one Who has done a mighty wrong." She goes.

Into the forest right bitterly

She leads in humble fear her way,

And ever about her the silence drips

Like black dew down from the rotted bough,

And timidly ever she stops to listen,

But the silence weeps and on she goes.

No voice makes sweet the whole night wood.

And Alladine is sinking down

Into the thick and heavy dark

At the mouth of the cave where the tarn-men sleep;

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And out of the cave the whispering wail Comes like thin arms round her, sinking. "And ye must sing," the whisper wails, "Sing to a forest made dumb for thee."

Then Alladine lifts up her eye

All in the forest at midnight hour,

And the mists like long sloughed viper skins

Are coiled round the dead men dancing there

A lank bone dance, and round and round

The dead men go, and round and round,

Their white feet slapping the black tarn's eye,

And in their hands wan wisps of fire

Which they hurl with a tooth-whistle down the

wind. Was ever such a sight before Spread to a lonely maiden's eye.'* "And ye must sing," the whisper wails, "Sing to a forest made dumb for thee."

"Oh Mother of Christ," thinks Alladine, "And sing I must, but how shall I sing?"

Then on a bow the jasper moon Set its green feet and swung o'er the meer, And silent shapes came one by one And sat in the dark of the jasper moon. To see these Alladine must weep, And the tarn-men stretch and chatter and wail 117

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And whistle a black wind thru her tears :

"Oh Mother of Christ," she moans, "sweet Mother,

As I am Motherless, help me now!"

But the great owl hoots along the mist. Bearing an echo of hell in his beak; He snickers and snaps his lips of bone. He sits above her own sweet head. Snipping the bones of a lesser bird. "And ye must sing," the whisper wails, "Sing to a forest made dumb for thee!"

Then Alladine lifts up her eye; Their good tears take the moon's own light, And soft her heart in her bosom trembles For the silent shapes beside the moon. And nothing thinks she of aught save these. And sweetly she weeps and weeps her woe. "Oh, proud have I been in my glittering hall, A sinner in scarlet and white and gold ! For a selfish joy I have wounded the world. And out of the sweet of the forest's tongue I have made a food for my vanity. Ah, that a king should call me fair, And a sweet prince speak his love of me. All for the vain, vain songs I sang! I have not loved; my part is woe. God have pity on my woe! Mary, my Mother, comfort me!" 118

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Comforted of her sin and woe, She tenderly lifts her voice to sing:

Love would wake in the morning, Glittering, high, and vain;

Love must sleep in the evening, And sleep in pain.

Sing not so low of dreaming.

For love shall come again. Haply under the morning,

And clean from pain.

Down sink the tarn-men in the meer;

The coiled mists thin and fail and go;

x\nd the great ov>d buffets the night with wings

That are full of flight and windy fear;

And the moon sweeps up, and the nightingales

Burst from the bough in chorus full,

A golden hymning of love eternal.

Till out of the night a white hand reaches

And presses the brow of Alladine.

The Prince he hunts the forest thru; The castle bells have tolled her flight; And the porter swears a ghost went bj^ And touched his keys. The miglity earl, He cries to horse, and all are out. But the Prince he hunts the forest thru; 119

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His heart is wild with bitter pain: "Oh, that I might see her face But once to charm my bitter pain!"

He nears the tarn. The sun is high;

It burns the dew in the violet,

It burns along her dreaming brow

And round her finger tips in the leaves.

He trails his purple scarf in the wind,

He gathers her lite in his own true arms:

"Oh, Alladine, fair Alladine,

Waken, waken, fair Alladine!"

But she wakes not yet; and when she wakes

A pure white tear is in her eye,

Low she kneels and listens her heart,

And the Prince is kneeling with her to pray.

The king's great earl he sees them there

And kneels with his men that all may pray.

THE END

120

THE SEEKERS

The Garden of Seven Trees

THE SEEKERS

To Hibbies of Same-House

The curtain goes up like mist lifted by morning wind. A stage, heaped with a living gray light, is revealed. The foreground is a section of a wide street which runs obliquely from left to right. From this street rises a massive wall of astounding dimensions, and along its heavy sitr- faces thick lusters ripen continuously into deep tone. A little to the right is a gate of wonderful proportions. It is set in an arch in the wall and is held by hinges and locks of corded gold. Upon the gate there are runes written in thick letters, set about by gems which glow and gleam.

Hidden in the gray light there are little laughters, the faint flutings of delicate voices, the snap of far steel cymbals, singings and chauntings. Forming themselves from the light, wings appear, ascending and descending, moving doion the street, clustering about the gate and tapping it with the agate lamps suspended at their tips. At times the wijigs melt thru the gate and seem to pass beyond. At times, and unproclaimcd. Voices chaunt and Symbols sing out of the light.

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A delicate strain of inusic which takes voice in one word:

VOICE

Beauty.

There is an opal flash of a wing, and the music leads away from the word, to return with timid echoes from every part of the stage:

ECHOES

Beauty Beauty Beauty Beauty

VOICE

Exceeding Loveliness.

ECHOES

Exceeding Loveliness Exceeding

VOICE

The Heart of God.

ECHOES

The Heart of God The Heart The Heart

A timid iridescence pales radiantly center stage. A Symbol sings. Light music blends in about the voice.

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SYMBOL

There is a drop of rose blood

Hidden on a star,

Hidden in a cavern of beauty,

Hidden on a radiant island

Set about with radiant waters.

Hidden, hidden, hidden

A drop of rose blood on a star.

A thicker light appears in a cluster of jrimfs at another part of the stage, from which a Voice chaunfs:

VOICE

In t!ie pale, hoarse caverns of time

Seek for the echo of seas, Seek for the sands that crept from I lie clime

Of the lavender orchid breeze. Seek for th; shell that is purple

From the press of the unfathomed tide, And for the green sea shadow

That sleeps like a bride From innocent lands. Sleeps on the lavender echoless sands.

SYMBOI„

Seek and seek and seek again : The pearl of longing is the price of pain. 125

The Garden of Seven Trees

VOICE

Star wind, star wind

Is flaming thru the mist flowers

In the gardens of the mind.

Terrible it is to seek,

Terrible it is to seek,

Terrible it is to seek, but more terrible to find.

VOICE, answering

The mist is but young witches' hair

Grown gray with fright,

Pulled thru the night

By nails on the finger-tips of shivering breezes :

All is fair and all is fair,

But there is a midnight wind that freezes.

A tide of color, like some heraldic influence moves across the stage and washes the walls and the gate.

VOICE, proclaiming

A strip of gold, a street, A gate from which no dews can fall. Higher than sunrise light, a wall, And seven barren beggars meet.

Seven beggars come on, moving slowly among the wings. On their heads they wear crowns of uplifted hands. They are dressed in robes of 126

The Garden of Seven Trees

one -piece. The colors of their robes are green, yoid, yurple, shimmer-dusk, red, vari-colored, and black with white. They sit in a semi-circle before the gate, claspinq their hands over their eyes.

SYMBOL, singing from above

Hidden, hidden, hidden yet,

On a star, on a star,

Hidden is the beauty you never can forget.

The rose blood where the orchid shadows are.

SECOND SYP^BOL, fvom abovc

Seek and seek and seek again. Seek and seek and seek again.

A CHORUS OF VOICES chaunting down the street

Come you early, come you late. He who seeks must sit and wait. Eyes that seek and see must close. No one knows and no one knows: No one knows and no one knows The dark within the shadow and the light within the rose.

After a movement of wings, the beggars speak. Not until they have spoken do they remove their clasped hands from before their eyes. 127

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FIRST

I seek for Life. {Green light)

SECOND

I seek for Death. (Gold light)

THIRD

I seek for Longing. (Purple light)

FOfRTH

I seek for Sleep. (Shimmer-dusk light)

FIFTH

I seek for Pain. (Red light)

SIXTH

I seek for Broken- Things. (Vari-colored light)

SEVENTH

I seek. (A shadow with a white wing in it passes)

Again the fluting of delicate voices, suggesting violets chanting the matins of the sun, or lilies in chorus like the nuns of Verdi. 128

The Garden of Seven Trees

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

These voices take the color of a whisper And lead me in a leash of pearls.

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

I feel The tug of wings about my eyes, the lift Upon my lashes of some fingers slight As filanjents of eider.

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

Potent, too, As dawn-dews swelling wide with sun.

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

Brother, No morning influence here, but such as conies From evening buds of primrose. The cordial Ripple of some dark wine I scent, shot thru With shadow-shafts of breeze, and lifted Curving above a valley bosom-grown With violets.

THE SEEKER FOR DEATH

What is this place? My eyes, Unrr sted from the dust, amaze themselves To look up into wings.

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THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

This is the place Of the great portal and the wall. I feel Already that I've followed out the full Length of my way. Yet now I burn the more To know what lies beyond.

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

These years I've walked Upon my heart. My foot is weary of Its pulse. The portals of my journey have Been many; but they opened not unto The thing I sought : always the waste, and way Boiling to the remotest verge of space, Hoarding its tidal heaviness in dim Disastrous sunsets. Here against the deep Russet and gold of this embossed gate, I bend the passion of my quest. And yet, Here is a dimness in the very eye Of light, the terror of the last assay.

THE SEEKER

Our way of weary distances is past: The dumb soul's deep disturbance, the great fast Of years, the pilgrim passion, and the urge Of our own planet tide whose deeps submerge The sensible will, and leave the spacious power 130

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Of our own minds o'erwhelmed in vague and dread Rushes of swelling cosmos, thru the dead Horror of unknown forces, these and all Are swept at last against this massive wall.

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

The sweet influence of wings, of songs Caught in the open lips of echo, and of light More mellow than the girdle of the sky, Presses me here to rich delirium. Oh broken heart, and heart of broken love, Here is your happiness before this gate! Heavy the scroll-like portal, and the script Of God, and yet

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

We are but beggars all. Before this last thick-lustered gate, before This wall like mountains piled on sunrise, let Us sit. For here is symbol of our lives: A windy street, a locked gate, and a wall Higher than vision. All my being rolls To the drum notes of vast voids beaten upon By clubs of thunder. From the hollow midst Of Chaos' stumbling heart I own a pulse Pushing my life to verges vast and dim. There to my fearful eyes the distances. Distinct in nothing, show such awful forms, 131

The Garden of Seven Trees

Huge, vague, straining with trouble, that my soul Jumps from me in somnambulistic terror, Seeking to fashion all, compose the dream.

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

Brothers, I seek the broken things of life

That I may fashion them to beauty. From

Whole things no new perfection can be made,

Nor quiet loveliness nor loveliness

Startling itself to tremulous unfolding.

But give me a lost shard of star, a flake

Of moony crispness, swift-cut sectors of

The space entwisted comet's beard, a flash

Of fin-carved cataract, a drop of night.

And such things fairies carry in their eyes

When they're most swift in love, and pixie jewels

Stolen from a cache under huge rainbow roots,

Give me but these, and in the single turns

Of my heart's radiant kaleidoscope,

I'll show you form on form of beauty, rare

Invested individualities

Of loveliness. Give me but liroken things.

A SYMBOL, suddenly singing

On the hearth of Vega

Lay a flute of flame. On the hearth of Vega

A flute whose stops were spurting fire. 132

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Why are all the ashes Upon the hearth of Vega? Ashes, ashes, ashes. And a dead desire!

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

Earth, gowned with night perpetual, footing

The winds of infinite waste, distemperate

With reeling powers, and hugely interlocked

In the minuet of God's remorse, tosses

Her bulk against the breast of space, muttering

In dervish madness her eruptional pain.

I who am born of dream-wrath, storms, and

powers Eruptional, attended dreadfully By the incubus of a pre-natal being, I who am hauled toward some drear end by an

influence Felt numbly and horribly, I, whose fevered flesh. Bitten by ulcer, dug by cancer, torn By mandibles tarantular, yet hangs Flapping against its bone rack, I, brothers, Lift my sore hands beneath these healing wings To catch their wafted medicine. It is Not and it is not and it is.

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THE SEEKER FOR DEATH

Within The black heart and beneath the eyehd gray, Engendering influences of eternal cold, Begetting on each other, brought me forth. Some finger, rubbing thru the dust of tombs. Touched me to quickness and to thought; so that I rose in my blank swaddling cerements there, Peered thru the distances beyond the dawn. Into the red mist of a giant heart. From thence there crawled toward me infinite Pulsings and forms veiled foolishly. These crept In thick amazement to my very feet. Like virgin worms in beatific fright. Then, striking their heads thru that thin pall Which hid what lay behind my back, they rose,

rose Like myriad phoenixes gifted with flames And golden shoutings, rose and swept into The vast increasing glory that piled its Billowy substance in refulgence heaped Against an ivory throne. Like tides they swept. Was this a dream.'* I know not, but 1 seek.

There is a great music above the gate, a concen- tration of wings into a pearly moon, and then a quartet of Voices chaunts. The beggars cross their hands over their hearts.

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VOICES

Beauteous blood of agonies, Rushing to marble pallor of rose, Catching the form and spirit of snows, Holding them melted, delicately still. Beauteous blood of agonies. Here is a pearl to drop to your deeps.

Here is a pearl to drop to your deeps, And the plummet soul of God shall strike Down thru your deeps, with chisel- wings carving, Carving the marble pallor of rose, Carving the forms and spirits of snows, Carving them, carving them till they are free. Free, God-wrought from the beauty and blood. The beauty and blood of agony.

The beggars uncross their hands, lift their eyes about them, and finally bend their looks upon the Seventh, who rises and speaks earnestly. The light upon the gate diffuses itself into a general richness.

THE SEEKER

In Life nor Death nor Longing, nor in Sleep Nor Pain nor Broken-Things, nor deep in deep, Nor high in high lies the true quest: behold. The runes upon the gate are script of gold! To seek and therefore still to seek, indeed 135

The Garden of Seven Trees

Eternally to seek is text and creed

For beggardom. Our perfect sorrows smite

Our blood, and tlien are wrought to deeds of light.

Tlie most dumb wonder is our wisdom. Ask

Meekly for ah in notliing, only ask

The fitness to desire all things greatly,

And those most which most are unattainable.

The lavender light an the gate quietly grmvs intense as, from above, there sounds a chorus of Voices and Symbols. The Seeker presses his ope?/ hands against his bosom {hands as white as lilies in a field of night) and remains standing icith closed eyes until the conclusion of the song.

CHORUS OP" VOICES AND SYMBOLS I

The naked wings of light are lifting.

Upon their tips of calcedon,

Agate flames of mossy dawn; And the glory is drifting, drifting

Down the walls. Tike an orchid shadow sifting

The moonlight as it falls.

II

Mossy are tlie flames and like bracken waving highly On a hill of sunrise naked to the sun, 136

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Mossy are the flames and like ferns and flowers waving In auroral breezes fresh and rare with sun, Mossy are the flames that strike the hoary gate. Sinking into amethyst and burning into gold, Glancing blunted from the hinges, from the huge and heavy letters Of the script runes that are never, never told.

Ill

Will the hinges ever swing

When the wing tips touch them? Will they shatter all the lamps of agate

Into shards of dim disaster? Faster, faster, faster The orchid light is rushing down the walls:

Win the hinges ever, ever, ever swing?

The beggars give expression to dumb agitation and awe. Quietly the light increases to serene opal and diamond pearl.

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

What portent rides the music of this chant? What indefinable presagement? Warm And opiate richness floats that lovely way My dreams come. Tumbling fountains of brave sound

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Are blown to mist of dulcet symphony, And wander down in dews upon my soul. I feel at last along the garden paths Of mind, the tread of that loved being who Shall burst the chrysalis of dream, and stand Awful and perfect to my very eye.

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

What wings are here ! These dripping tips of speed Have surely struck to shards the altar vase Of Lord Jehovah's deepest wine, and now, Eager with vermeil tincture, eat raw space Empty of gloom. Their carved agate lamps. With crystal mosses burn like star-spray. See, The light sweeps off the hoar frost from the walls. And inlays the hoar gate with ferny fire, Lavender gold, and purple porphyry.

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

And down the street, whose way for me has been A hard way swept with spittle-dust and wind, A maiden angel sunbeam dances fast Beside the happy, happy heart of youth.

CHORUS, repeating in the distance

Will the hinges ever swing When the wing tips touch them? Will the hinges ever, ever, ever swing? 138

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THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

Within my heart I feel a sorrow weep,

Like some young babe weeping within the womb.

Fearing its birth.

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

And trouble lies against My soul, like oleander blossoms blown. Smothering sweetly.

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

Trembles now the light Over the gate? The great runes start and swell In new conception of portentous truth.

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

And lo ! the wings strike ever on the runes And dash their tips of calcedon to flakes Of rose. Against the portal's base there lie Dim shards of agate from the wrecked lamps

strewn : There let me kneel and pray.

{He kneels before the gate)

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

Vague, vague and awful were the words they sang:

" Will the hinges ever swing? "—What lies beyond?

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The Garden of Seven Trees

THE SEEKER FOR DEATH

The mystery of death !

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

Of Hfe the secret and the thing I seek.

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

Beyond there is a garden of dark hhes Swinging with pale dew at their hps, and streams Of ebon waters flowing thru dim banks Of asphodel.

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

Perchance there are no distances Beyond, so that the hand may touch the fruit And body of the soul's full eye, the dreams Of vision and the images of sense.

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

This runed and lustered gate will never swing But to reveal the teeth of engineries Munching the world; and that huge goatish power Which milks the noonday from the mountain peaks, And bunts those breasts of earth flat to the plain.

The Seeker for Broken-Things rises, letting drift thru the light two handfnls of agate shards. He addresses the Seeker for Pain in excited reproof.

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The Garden of Seven Trees

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

Beyond are fairies seated on wind flowers, hair-

bells, Primroses and daffodils, all madly capped With pluckt inverted violets, with prankt Nasturtiums, and columbines dripping Red and gold honey down their backs. Lovely Their little feet dangling in pans of dews Which sweet fern grasses treasure from the stars.

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

The gate is shut!

OTHERS

The gate is shut! The gate is shut!

THE SEEKER

I will lift up my voice against some wing Whose disembodied flight culls the pure air Of so much wonder, and will ask that thing Whose answer must reveal what's hidden there.

(A Symbol comes on surrounded by heavy light)

Oh, gracious influence, pause ai'.d lower down Your flaming tips of flight! Let no dark frown Dimming your agate lusters, strike these meek And barren beggars here who only seek Beauty and balm and truth and mystery. 141

The Garden of Seven Trees

Tell us, what is this gate whose history, So heavily written, weighs the eye of sense To an iinprofited close?

THE SYMBOL

If all you known were unknown, It were better, better far Than to know the things which are Beyond this wall of symbol stone.

Dome and spire and minaret, Never yet and never yet Rose alone and cut their beauty From the pallor of the dawn. Beggars, beggars, now begone; For the gate may swing At the touching of a wing; At the touching of a wing. The gate may swing.

As the Symbol vanishes, a chorus of voices

Sit in the dust of the street. Barren beggars, it is meet. Spread your hands in prayer. Cup them to the winged air, Clasp them to your eyes and hearts, E'er the mystery departs. Barren beggars, barren beggars, Sil in the dust of the street. 142

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THE SEEKER FOB PAIN

These voices yell like cymbals, or like iron Tambourines, in the cave of that great Satyr, God, the Circe-spouse and swineherd of us All. Whips us squealing thru the blackness, Feeds us husks of cruel wonder, leads us To deep troughs of bitter admiration Which reflect our tusks and jowls. Brothers, Broken is my speech my heart is broken !

(He sits apart, weeping)

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

Sweeping toward the gate, I see a host Of veiled forms such as often we beheld Pass in dim barges down the ghostly ways That are the doubles of the brooks of heaven!

THE SEEKER FOB DEATH

And lo! they melt within its substances And seem to pass beyond. The hinges hold, Grasping among the runes, their noble power Against motion. Fear throws her shattering wave Like folds of doom around my soul. I'll go And touch the gate.

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

The wings may strike the lock! 143

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THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

It is more fit That I should be the first to touch the gate.

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

Do I not hear a crying from the walls?

THE SEEKER FOR DEATH

You hear the winds dropping exhausted at your feet.

THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

You hear the angels' lovely feathers Patting the tender spaces of Paradise.

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

Go not to touch the gate! Sit in the dust!

A VOICE FROM THE GATE

Read my runes, Count vay jewels. Read my runes Or ever you come to me.

THE SEEKER

The jewels are infinite, the runes are oM Bedded in fossil flowers of ancient gold: 144

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Truth cannot be except it be but so. These scripts were better read before we go Too near the gate. Hark how the iron song. Chorused with prophet voices, volleys along In full returning echoes: "It is meet: Oh, barren beggars, sit upon your feet.

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

Dearer than truth, than Christ's unanswered

question Is the thing I seek. I will not turn away.

{He goes toward the gate as if to open it)

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

Do I not hear a crying from the walls?

There soimds aloud a crying voice like an angry eagle rushing from her eerie. The Seeker for Long- ing is struck with a pause, his hand outstretched ioioard the gate. All the beggars look up in sad terror.

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

There is a sword falling thru space, a voice Singing mightily at its tip!

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

It is a dream !

145

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THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

It is a steel sword al unhanded, swift. It's flaming down the archway of the wall: If it shou'd strike the lock !

THE SEEKER

Lo! Lo! It strikes!

The beggars cover their eyes and kneel, facing the gate. There is a great flash of fire that blasts the color from the walls and the portal vhich like a slab of slate swings back revealing a blank loaste of utter nothingness. After a silence the beggars take their hands from their eyes and one by one put their croivns onto the earth before them.

THE SEEKER FOR LIFE

I see nothing beyond!

THE SEEKER FOR DEATH

Nor I!

THE SEEKER FOR PAIN

Nor I! O!

THE SEEKER FOR LONGING

I see a wide space

THE SEEKER FOR SLEEP

Blown full of poppies, gray Sunken into pillows.

146

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THE SEEKER FOR BROKEN-THINGS

Gcd makes but perfect things! {Weeps)

THE SEEKER

I am content.

They sit silent. A Symbol, most beautiful, comes on, singing.

The light has gone from the walls,

And the heavy runes are gray; But you have your hearts, you have your hearts.

And you'll have them alway.

(Lights softer)

Oh, Life and Death and Longing,

Oh, beggars, Pain and Sleep And you, the Christ of Broken-Things,

Never weep and never weep; For you have your hearts, you have your hearts,

And you'll have them alway.

The Influence passes, and a rich light crowds in. A lovely music sounds the emotion of spiritual happiness

THE SEEKER

I am content.

147

THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TREES

The Garden of Seven Trees

THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TREES

To P of the golden foot, who has journeyed here, a compa?iion.

elements of the poem

Man

Seven Spirits of QuestiOxV

Two Good Shepherds:

The Golden Shepherd of Souls The Silver Shepherd of Flesh

Gold Sheep

Silver Sheep

Voice of the Garden

Voice of the Spaces

Voice of the Suns

Voice of the Abysses

A Voice in the Garden

God

The Basket Carriers

The Universes

The Lovely World

Music and Radiance

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Scene and Statement

Among the Upper Spaces and above the Abysses, there comes out of the blackness, distinct with dia- mond outline, the Garden of Seven Trees. Near the upper verge of the Garden, beneath the Great Tree, sits Man. From his place he views immedi- ately before him the Field of Bright Space, from the further end of which rises the Mystic Mountain. To his right and left he views the Endless Expanses quarried by the Abysses and overhung by the Upper Spaces whose suns pour down an endless light thru the darkness and into the deeps.

Behind Man lies the Garden, a place full of radi- ance and all manner of beauty. Above this Garden hover the Seven Spirits of Question, and in the Garden are the two Good Shepherds with their Flocks.

To the right of Man is one particularly deep Abyss, into which continuously is plunging the fall of the Red Sun. At the bottom of the Abyss, indis- tinct in the ivarm feathering mist, is a world which beats like a heart, the Lovely World. From this world, breasting the cataract of light. Thoughts in gold and silver flashings rise and are led into the Garden by one of the Seven Spirits.

Man, gowned in a glowing gray garment, sandled with pale dusty slippers, rests on a mound of green gold,

152

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VOICE OF THE GARDEN

Glorious is the garden of radiant pastures.

Cool to the silver lip of the flesh,

And warm to the golden tongue of the soul.

Its mounds of loveliness are the feeding place of

beauty; The foot of the hungry is refreshed at the root of

the grasses, Refreshed beneath the flower of the grasses And among the fallen fruit of lilies.

Glorious is the garden with its seven trees,

Mighty to take the wonder of the suns.

Mighty to stand in the spaces.

Their arms are curled cataracts of gold

Reaching upward into the immensities;

Their heads are rounded mountains of topaz;

Their roots are veins of rich ore grappling the

abysses : Glorious are the seven trees of the garden.

Glorious is the garden with its flocks,

Its flocks like leaves that are white with the new

moon at morning. Its flocks like leaves that are fat with sunlight. The lovely care of the Good Shepherds. Their silver feet are in among the lilies. Their golden feet trample among the roses, 153

The Garden of Seven Trees

Their voices are diamonds and rubies in the low

bushes, Gems and trumpets in the grasses: Glorious is the garden with its flocks.

Over the garden are the Seven Spirits;

Strong are their feet with talons,

Their wings are mighty.

Over the garden are the Seven Spirits;

They carry their joy in their beaks.

Their birth was afar off.

Pilgrim, with the dust of the distances

Piled like wan silver in the folds of your garment.

Rest in the garden.

VOICE OF THE SPACES

I am the Spaces.

My bosom is full of the breath of the Mighty, Black and sounding are the deeps of my bosom Ribbed with the white bones of the vast uttermost. In me are lost the abysses and the universes; They call to each other and cease in the midst

of me. Like blind glowing worms are the round-toiling

systems, Spinning a frail silk and casing each other With laces of silver, with gowns wrought golden. I am the Spaces ! And in my bosom I toss with ray panting the suns of the ages. 154

The Garden of Seven Trees

Pilgrim, with eyes that are dark, dark with

searching, Touch with your vision the sweep of ray beauty. And rest in the garden.

VOICE OF THE SUNS

Our food is the will of God, Our light is the purpose of the Supreme. Over the heavy-mouthed abysses, Bellowing and deep down booming The rumbling thunder of our cataracts, We hang forever.

Out of us rushes forever

The fleeting steep gulfs of wild glory;

The wonder and wonder

And might of our thunder,

Never and never shall fail.

We fill the abysses and wild wildernesses

With glory and beauty and praise;

The steep glowing gulfs of our glory

Never and never shall fail.

Ours is the rainbow

Sinking low

And outward gleaming;

Ours is the radiance, the brilliancy streammg

Into iris and mauve

155

The Garden of Seven Trees

And madder inwove

With diamond lace and pearl mist

Far below;

Ours is the joy of the day and the deeps

And the steeps

Where we list

To break our breasts open into a rose.

Pilgrim, we are the Suns.

We eat of the baskets of mercy and spread our

power. Rest in the garden.

VOICE OF THE ABYSSES

Our lips are dabbled black with space. Our teeth are green glaciers shocking and grinding. Our throats are red volcanoes groaning Eruption of lavas and rubies.

In our bellies lie the green white world Feathered about by the wings of Jehovah; Blue steel is the shield of Jehovah above them, Blue steel jewelled rarely, a marcliing place For jade-pale stars, heeled with wonder. Striking the night jet into red beauty; There pass also grey panoplied armies Of oceans abundant, clouds doubling and march- ing.

156

The Garden of Seven Trees

We are the quarries, the pits of beauty; We scar all space, we swallow the suns; Our breath is a whirlblast ridden with rubies; The deeps of our blackness are fastened with flame.

Pilgrim, in thy foot is dominion,

And in thy breast is a heart for terror:

The beard of Jehovah is blown thru the suns;

There are mighty ways outward.

MAN

Pilgrim of the immensities, I have Attained thru the wide dreaming of my soul This place of beauty. Here my great desire Feeds full of wonder, and my heart beats to A worthy worship of the infinite. No longer now my straining sense divines Things greatly hidden which it may not know, Majestic things even at the finger tips Of mind, yet moving outward into mist, Ungraspable. What horror was it then, When underneath the gripping incubus Of my strange inability, I felt About me hosts of unknown things, discerned By the soul's fine antennae, but not known! Objects of beauty still beyond the eye, Music wrought subtly, still beyond the ear, 157

The Garden of Seven Trees

And every sense in agony tantalized

By wistful wild imaginations. So

A frenzy grew upon me till at last

In a hot twisted darkness fire began

To spurt fierce lightnings round my mind, and in

The blackness of pine-mumbling winds there

rushed Fountains of fairy sweetness cool from heaven And made deep wells within my bosom, soft As rest. Then a new mind came upon me, And what was once deception vanished quite, And what desire proved thru its longing stood Instant and cherishable. Thereupon The limit of my easy ranging thought Slipped out from world to world, from universe To universe, thru space to outer space Even as it willed. Union with God remains.

FIRST SPIRIT OF QUESTION, FROM ABOVE

Oh, astounded mortal,

With the azure of agony circling your brilliant eyes.

Unfettered here from sense, whose element is sense

And limitation, listen to a voice

Which elsewhere has been heard. Remember yet

That ere you strove with the Powers and con- quered them and came 158

The Garden of Seven Trees

Beneath this tree, how to your infant eye

The systems coiled away. Now rising above your

self, You here mistake your littleness of sense For the mightiest verges of outroaring space. These wings and those of all my sisters have

grown wan Beyond the little margins, and our eyes. Born out of space and testing easily The ever-flowing leagues, saw yet no ending.

MAN

Bring now the concourse of your sisters round. And we shall judge whether their wings or these My thoughts have striven outward most. I deem No feather, even of spirits, has the lightness Of vision, no, nor yet the strength of faith, Nor yet the swiftness of my keen desire. Within my bosom there is that which owns A Father, whom I seek. Eternal Beauty Has put his spittle-moistened clay upon My eyes even at the womb's mouth. Go And call.

The Spirit vanishes toward the midst of the Gar- den. There is a sound of a red trumpet's winding, and then a shivering of the atmosphere as the Seven Spirits descend and stand about the base of the mound of green gold.

159

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FIRST SPIRIT

Lo! here we stand whose wings even now Shook all the spaces.

MAN

Harpy-angels, terrible and beautiful! What is your property?

FIRST SPIRIT

To question all that is

SECOND SPIRIT

All that is not.

MAN

No more than this.''

THIRD SPIRIT

And more than more: to sit upon our trees And guard into the Garden, flesh and soul. Those beings from the Lovely World who rise Against the cataracts of the great Red Sun.

FOURTH SPIRIT

And then to watch and wait, to watch and wait !

FIFTH SPIRIT

To hover and to hover, 160

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SIXTH SPIRIT

Or to go

Outward thru the rivers of the blackness

And the tides of darkness and the falls of thunder,

Outward to the regions where the spaces pale and

dim, And brighten into A^oices crying wonder. Into mists where failing oceans join the utter white

of distance, and beyond.

SEVENTH SPIRIT

Tip to tip your wings spread outward

As you would above the foam moons

Calling on the mystic ocean.

Fiery tip to tip surround him

Till he doubts no more the question

That has gone beyond his dreaming.

They spread their loings tip to tip and so stand enclosing Man in wan green light.

MAN

Your wings have touched the beautiful, but these Your breasts above your hearts are pale. The

night Has fallen round your faces, and the night Hangs in the hollows of your throats. Yet deeper In your wing pits is a ghastliness, 161

The Garden of Seven Trees

And these your eyes that you bend close upon me Wear scales as do a sloughing serpent's eyes. And with these would you see? The might of all Your wings is blind, and darkly have you spoken.

FIRST SPIRIT

We speak the darkness of the question. Outward swept we. Thinly failing The space-bows bent around us, on whose backs Great stars rode, and under whose dim arches

swung Milky eternities of infant light. There working thru the black and hidden roots That fed the fearful heaven, we descried A saffron emptiness. Ah, pale indeed The mystery we carry in our wing pits, Closest to our hearts! Boast you against the

deeps.'*

MAN

It was not here to boast I wrought my way. But to ease all my worship in some prayer Whose loveliness might equal that same Beauty You know npt, and to whom I pray. In all Your coursing over all the tides, your sweeping Circles round the ocean's failing foam. Saw you as yet my Father and my Mother And my Brother? Saw you as yet this Beauty? Or sounded yet this Infinite with your wings? 162

The Garden of Seven Trees

INIake not yourselves so terrible, but answer. For well I know this Being is, tho yet I see Him not.

FIRST SPIRIT

Nor ever shall. Among the filling tides

There is no place for such an One. He wrought

In other times a huger universe

Of vast and awful powers whose waging strength

Swimg upward into ruin; He is gone.

The ruin only battles down the waste,

Illimitable in concourse working war.

MAN

Go! Now I see your sense is little and Your darkly flaming bulks clipped in wan fire Are hollow, wanting anthems, wanting soul. Almighty are the spaces, temple-roomed To give eternal echo to man's worship. The halleluiahs to the Mighty from Earth's trumpeting hills re-chorus here their joy, Doubling the majesty of praise. Even now The lilies break beyond you and the palms Flash golden. Hosts of lovely brothers come Bearing hosannas in their bosoms. White The space before me gleams. Behold! Behold! Ten million marching with one voice, and ten Times these ten million in antiphony. Oh God, oh Beauty, One in One and All, 163

The Garden of Seven Trees

Appear! My eyes seek for your naked face, My heart for your great laboring bosom seeks !

Man stands with his arms stretched out toivard the Field of Bright Space which is revealed to him more and more. The Seven Spirits rise, throwing down about him their ghastly light, and chanting

Seven trees in the garden of beauty, Seven trees in the garden of chaos, Man in the garden of beauty and chaos. Death in the hlies, doom in the roses.

Far down the Field of Bright Space, ascending and descending the lustrous stairway thai leads up the Mystic Mountain, and going out to the Suns. the Basket Carriers are seen. They sing:

SONG OF THE BASKET CARRIERS

Gems and blood we carry in our baskets,

Light from the eyes of the Eternal,

Life from the heart of the Supreme,

And the hunger and the hunger and the hunger

Of the suns we feed.

Our ways are outward and inward, Woven ways among the universes. Gold lives upon the soles of our feet, Gold is pressed into our paths: The spaces are in flower with our going. 164

The Garden of Seven Trees

The lips of the suns are heavy with hunger, And there is no Umit to the Beauty of God : Gems and blood we carry in our baskets.

MAN

And my lips, too, have tasted of this blood! Upon my heart I know the power of life Pressing its inner throbbings to my pulse. Until I move commingled with all things. Even so I feel the quality of God Which is to give from His sole self that being Whose myriad blooms darken the diamond edges Of the white mountains. Here I lift my soul To the uttermost by one quick thought that there Is yet a vaster thing than the uttermost, A heart within it all. On either hand The gathering spaces rise, charged with loud suns Whose cataracts mouth thunder in the deeps. Yonder the lovely mountain lifting up The beauty of this field to cloudy light; And here this garden rich among the spaces, Set with broad trees like rooted constellations Grown close with gold. Here roam two mighty

flocks Deep-smothering their shining lips among The glooms of rounded lily fruits and shades Shook from thick roses. Fat their silver sides Pant with their feeding on the nectar flowers, 165

The Garden of Seven Trees

And fat their golden bellies moving low Among the oleander blooms. Perchance These two who watch them, seeming strange to

me And yet not strange may speak and tell me all That vision brings me here so marvelously. Upon the brow of one there sits a frail Clear brilliance, like remembered starlight fallen Pale to the eyes of immortal infancy Wide in their aeon gloom; and on the brow Of that one other flows a light of deep And pitiful yearning.

There breaks in a Voice chanting from the Garden.

Saffron sleep folds long mist

Over the eyes of the dreamer,

And seals the lips of the mist with amber:

Dream, dream, dream.

On earth there was a yellow war

Between the Flesh and the Spirit.

Neither was whole, but each the bigot

Struck, and the tender breast of the other

Winced like the nightshade apple,

Madragora's sweet full apple.

When the fisted frost strikes up from the fen-land

Under her canopy low and green.

166

The Garden of Seven Trees

There were stars in the cool of heaven,

Thoughts of God and the pale hereafter,

Of spirits folding like valley lilies,

Their perfumes mixing, their sweets entwined;

Thoughts of life in the one forever.

Anthems lifted aloft the stars.

Bearing in whiteness of chanted hosannas

The two made one to the last high union:

Two lost together and one forever with One.

There was the hot, hot musk of the rose Bare on the forest path beneath bare feet. The breasts of women close-cinctured together Brewing a perfume mad and wild. Dewy banks of violet, violet and asphodel. Matted in the morning, strangling in the sunshine Of loosened hair and sunshine. And in the odors of the tigers that hurled and

tumbled there. Nard and sweat and lilies pale, Sweat and nard and roses red, On the earth, on the earth; For the mind of God was bleeding. And His heart was white and wistful. When He wrought the miracle. The miracle imperfect of the great love that

made it, Costing Him the expiation of the aions and the

cosmos.

167

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As the Voice is chanting, the two Shepherds ap- proach Man. One is gowned in a simple garment of silver, the other in a one-piece garment of pale gold. They seat themselves silently beside Man and so remain until the Voice has ceased. Their eyes are heavy with love; there is a great wistfulness in their faces.

MAN

I seem to know you by a memory in My mind and by an echo in my heart Returning fresh from white crags sweet with snow. It was not in that first eternity When my soul slept among the high blue foun- tains, Dreaming its aeon music; no, nor when In earlier birth I drew apart from one All-multitudinous chaos cradling me. Was it when nebulous glory whirled itself Into a system that rose like swift larks. Gold breasted, silver voiced against the dawn? I can not tell; but of me there is much That sought you somewhere sometime heretofore.

GOLDEN SHEPHERD

Immortal is the essence of your heart. Drawing its nature far down gleaming beds Of God-struck waters. In those mighty days When God reached out His hand and felt the chaos 168

The Garden of Seven Trees

Plunge willful, wild with strange got power, nor

heeding Whence came its fullness, then God closed His

hand And held the infant forces, fashioned them In serviceable form, and peopled them With beings who might joy to recognize Their maker, unrebellious, full of worship. Thus wrought He; and I heard a voice that said, "Come forth, for we have now made man, no

senseless Property revolting under law, but such An one as cased in a sweet substance may Companion me. And therefore now look well That nothing of this lovely creature go Unshepherded. His thoughts of soul I make Your care; as golden sheep they shall arise From out the l.,ovely World, and you Shall pasture them among the Seven Trees." So Lord Jehovah spoke ; and much of you Already here I shepherd in my flock; For of your immortality partakes Each golden impulse of your living soul.

MAN

With you, then, are the glories of my soul. Which, passing from me, could not die or yet Forget their parentage. Converse I held 169

The Garden of Seven Trees

In unsubstantial mystery with these things, Nor lost a thought, even to my God-head, of Things born in me. And so I knew a sure Eternity begun in me, nor lost The parting breath, the wonder and the clamor Of my sweet worship. This my entity, Tho centered here, already wings the spaces. Myriad voiced, and tender in its multitude To one whole Beauty. Like a wind my soul, Dropped in a million flowers, arising thence In essences of dew toward one Sun. And you, whose brow a patient sorrow bears, Where has my being found its love of you?

SILVER SHEPHERD

Where substances were wrought into first beauty, Delightfully shapen with fancy supreme, even

where Your being found its loveliness of form. Within the sweet hands of the Lord. Then spoke

He: "Come forth, for we have wrought a mansion fair For Man, and veined it up and down with life, Packed it with fruit, and set a light within It, set our nard upon its altars, set Our harps of ages playing there with might Of psalms. Take of this living mansion now The eternal care, or until such a time 170

The Garden of Seven Trees

As well may come." So speaking, down he smote

His hand upon my forehead, and left there

The finger furrows of His agony.

The infinite impulse of your unsouled heart

I tend, my silver flock among the trees.

MAN

I had a lesser sense for such a thought. Yet rendered sacred by the wine it dipped in, The blood-thorn sacrament, the midnight sweat Of the Great Heart. Was it not possible, then. In all the lengths of time to sour the sweet Of flesh? And cherishes God in silver cask The panting agonies of lily night? Now firm completeness closes round my faith That I shall know this Beauty and this God While so I stand, my myriad self inmixed Already with the universes which Must live; for I have tasted life with them, And been their foot, their eye, their mouth, their tongue.

Now sounds from the deeper garden the song of the flocks, sung in antiphonal manner. Man stands during the song; the Shepherds remain bowed.

171

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Song of the Flocks

SILVER SHEEP

When Into the eye of God

There fell out of the blackness

Pale forms of beauty,

Then knew we our being.

Swift was the starlight

Over the bosoms of burning orchids :

The white desert ached at our birth.

GOLDEN SHEEP

When God was utterly weary

And had put His head beneath the deeps

That no glory might assail Him,

Then a dream grew in the spaces,

Touched the outward failing foam that rims with

beauty The immensities, and all that was Left wild of God, and so descended, Downward till it made a pillow beneath the deeps. The brows of God were bare; And the great eyes closed Were more lovely than wild calla-lilies Rare and budding full. The brows of God were bare. Bare as cliffs of diamond mountain. And the great eyes closed

Were two lovely conyons mounded full of lilies, 172

The Garden of Seven Trees

When the dream beneath the deeps Rose and smote along His brows Like gold thunder out of morning: Then we knew and had our being.

SILVER SHEEP

Forms were we of pale created beauty, Made from the delicate atoms of God's vision When vision lingered young within His mind; Forms were we in pure wing-living silver, Loosened into shape by bladed fire Cleaving our outlines close and free. Then from the vision outward flashing We sought the cataracts of the great Red Sun, Plunged with its pulse, smote out at last Our loveliness into a heart lesser than God's, And yet so roomed and living so by love. Thence warmed again by some strange passion Stirring its arms about us, we rose, fire in our breasts, And cooled our breasts against the cataract Until down-warded here by unwilling angels. But still our passion moves us, and we know our

ways are outward, Somewhere among the universes blown and far

and wild.

GOLDEN SHEEP

When the dream smote.

And the thunder broke white on the brow of the Lord;

173

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When the deeps rolled And lifted the lilies above His great eyes, Our elements gathered from the far-fringing foam Of the out-going measureless ocean, Were struck by His spirit fresh from its rest, Sanctified, glorified, rendered eternal. W^e not from the mind of the master Creator, But high from his spirit dream-struck in the high- est With tender and infinite morning. So floated we forth, down the white winds wander- ing, To the Lovely World in the iris abyss; And there achieving our wonder were loosened, Returning like glances of light to the spaces, Led here to the shepherded flock of the Garden, But yearning for the out-flowing measureless

foam Of the ocean immense with an infinite being.

SILVER SHEPHERD

Hear you these chants.'^ Oh, brother!

GOLDEN SHEPHERD

Yes, I hear.

SILVER SHEPHERD

And have we tended these in vain? Their being Was elsewhere fashioned and yearns elsewhere to Be going.

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GOLDEN SHEPHERD

Useless then our mounded pastures, Our silver lily fruits, our golden apples Of the musk rose; useless then our hearts Blood-warmed and spirit-fired, our tender Ministrations.— Behold the universes Sweep, their ways are outward, and these go. In vacant richness shall our pastures bloom, Smothering down to ashes. Wet with blackness The flowers that were silver on your pathways, The flowers that were golden by my footfall!

MAN

Are these flocks then of me? Of my own flesh And of my spirit?

GOLDEN SHEPHERD

Yes, but first of God.

MAN

And am I one with these and so eternal? So is my God eternal? I like Him? And I shall measure out myself thru all The eternities, never wasting tho Upbuilding? And He, eternal in division, Eternal and eternal and eternal, But beautiful in all? Shall I be lost At last with Him and all be lost in all? 175

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Or shall each live with all and each be all? Look! down the field of Space a lovelier light, And those strange beings toiling up the mount, And here a glory moving in the Garden, Thru all the upper spaces pathways gleaming, The universes forming with their bosoms outward, And the thunder and the wonder, a nd the foam Dashing far out where the black oceans toil Against the uttermost. My God is here !

Man and the Shepherds bow while a great chant rises from the deeps.

CHANT OF THE UNIVERSES

We, we the elements of chaos,

Brayed by almighty pestels

In the pit of the eternal.

Roar, roar, roar.

The abysses are our coarse- voiced trumpets.

Black-throated, twisted round with cobalt,

Full sounding craters of eruption,

We roar.

Now is to be born a new cosmos. Now is to be born a new cosmos, Born out of fury, born into beauty,- We roar and come.

There is a great movement among the universes. The Basket Carriers are seen rushing back out of 176

The Garden of Seven Trees

the spaces and hastening up into the mists of the mountain; the clouds break away higher and higher.

MAN

"Now is to be born a new cosmos" out

Of the old chaos ! So the master cycle

Swings beneath my view. Now shall I see

Born Beauty sweet from the womb arise

To hail its Father with the voice of storms.

So worked the miracles to this one age,

Brewed, wrought, and labored to this only hour.

Such voices yet shall rise to God as only

The voice of man has little echoed in

The transepts of his temples. Hear! The voice!

The VOICE OF GOD sounding from the Mountain. Man, know you the being from whose self you are. What wild high pilgrimage now brings you here. Corse-fettered still, striding these mighty ways? Why tempt you now My bosom with that form Which love could yield only in dreams, and which Love hungers for till dreams returning bring His children to the Father? Speak to me.

MAN

I thought thee awful, found thee kindly, voiced Humbly, with simple mercy loving me. So this great moment but a little be

177

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Delayed, I'll set my full presumption forth, My agony, and the purpose wrought from it. Lovely the world you gave me for my home. The emerald and the snow in season mixing Their pleasant beauty, and the far lands hung With misty seas slow heaving thru the morning Their breasts of vert and azure, perfect in sleep, And waking, tipt with chastened pearl ! My God, I loved that earth, love still; but something Along my temples held my eyes wide, wide As in strong madness, and I saw the nations Rush armed together, until a beast rose up. Fang-jawed, jowls oozing blood and stench along His hairy breast, a monster risen up. And man an evil smell beneath a mist That, yellow seething, boiled along the world. My heart was packed in torn and rotted heat. And sick beyond sick with terror. Oh, my God, Then I remembered thy sweet waters, rose And washed myself, considered thy untoiling Lilies, and weeping all my tears until The boiling tempest of my spirit lay Cooled in their chalices, I swooned in prayer : And in my swoon I passed, longing for thee. Even to this place.

THE VOICE OF GOD

My son, your love has been Of great spirit, and an understanding 178

The Garden of Seven Trees

Of high things has passed into your heart. Yet, being but a part of me you well Mistake the purpose of the whole; for, lo, Death is the sweet food at the root of life. And in me nothing lost. Those powers I lose Upon each other labor but in me, Working my being. Manifold immense Disasters to your eye those gracious means Thru which I gain my consummation. Now Move to the throne ground of Bright Space The summoned Universes and the Powers, There to work out a goodlier will of mine For a broader cycle of eternity. Mark now the body of doom riding her Catafalque, and rising thence like May In your own Southern mountains. In this hour I shall redeem the Immensities. Behold !

At this the Suns banded into Universes swing in from Space, assembling mightily before the Mys- tic Mountain. The Abysses are left dark and hol- low, sounding with raw thunder. Above the Garden the Seven Spirits hover, striking a saffron light from their wings; and in the Garden the flocks trample about in awful agitation. A change begins to work upon the Seven Trees, and here and there a fountain of blackness spurts out over the Garden from the walling space around.

179

The Garden of Seven Trees

MAN

Seeking for Beauty I find but Truth. I gaze Too long upon the rose, the Universes Cramp, and mighty symbolisms strike Broadly across the infinite. The face Of God for which I seek becomes a voice Speaking a common language, and the worlds Are summoned as autumn leaves ; as winter fruits The Universes pile before the Mount. The Spaces are left dark to the marching feet Of aby ssmal thunders ; the black ocean shakes Her flood beyond her shores; and my own world Remaining only in the Spaces, gleams With arrowy jet, with shafted ebony tipped Dark diamond.

GOLDEN SHEPHERD

Our flocks are struck by the Black fountains.

SILVER SHEPHERD

Let us among them, still

To be watching in the midst of the Garden.

MAN

Pray you with me detain yourselves In love, and let us lay our lips together Upon the breast of this great moment, and Feed from the source magnificent of life. 180

The Garden of Seven Trees

GOLDEN SHEPHERD

We go to the deeps of the Garden. He who feeds

Upon the truth of mystery, must feed

Alone.

SILVER SHEPHERD

We go to the deeps of the Garden. If there come A moment past the might of sufferance, And you would join us, join us as you may, In prayer among the loveliness of one Eternity a moment wrecked, and cast Like Pity underneath the winds of Space.

{They go.)

MAN

Like mighty captives stride the worlds along, Their naked loveliness like the breasts of men Blushing with power; and hugely interlocked Are they, in heavy armies bound by chains Circling in thick coils of power. Now rushes down, Swift from the unknown reaches, a great wind, A cough of chaos storming full of fire; Now hurl the Universes breast to breast Their leagued ranks, their heavy bulks up-tossed Among the tempests: huge their battle rage! Some blackened lie rough-clashing in their chains, Like sea-sunk skeletons of galley slaves When thunders moil the oceans deeply down; And others rear like maddened mountains blowing 181

The Garden of Seven Trees

Steep wrath to heaven, till their bulks consumed Collapse with mighty clapping of their sides. And there the flocks with eyes hot carbuncle Break from the weeping Shepherds, and with

flanks Striking their silver and gold into red fury, Unlike the things they were, rush far beyond The Garden, down the Bright Field, leaping On fire-spitting hoofs until they hurl themselves Into the wilder flame. On high there sweep, Beyond the great trees rising, the Seven Spirits Screaming an iron wail, fearfully charging Upward into the blackness. Inrushing chill Breaks black and green upon the trampled flowers Blue-cut by hoofs, like flesh all numb and dead. The great trees shake like piles of ashy ice Upbuilded by ocean tides, and struck again Until their moaning heights sink into foam. Oh, God, is this Thy silence.'* Shall I, too, go Into the deeps of the Garden, mix myself With the most lovely thing that ruin ever Blasted? Immensities redeemed the greater Comes but beauty lies so near and low ! Yet shall I wait the forming of new suns In splendor swinging highly, and all Space Fair blooming with these roses and these lilies; And I shall wrestle thru a greater chaos To a greater doom than this. Amen ! Amen !

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The Garden of Seven Trees

SONNET

Out of the drifting years there comes to me A slow sad seriousness of mind and heart, Child-wondering, and musing over art. Too tender, most. Some full eternity Falls closely round, and yet I can not free Its awful shapes, nor know God's mind, nor know The form of Love, that I may look and go. Saying with faith, "This thing is Beauty see!"

Even such my doubting. Yet upon my soul Is struck a stern commandment. A great voice Is on the hills, a summons on the deep. Be it then so that I search out the goal That's set for me, not fearful of the choice Or failing ever That good will to keep.

183

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